IBM Halts Pentium Shipments

IBM Halts Pentium Shipments — IBM said Monday that they are halting shipments of Pentium-based PCs because the risk of floating point division errors in Intel’s chips was "worse than previously described." Intel has asserted in press releases and public announcements that the bug’s probability of occurring is only once in every 27,000 years of typical use and that the majority of off-the-shelf software would not be affected. IBM, however, said their tests indicate that common spreadsheet programs could generate the error as frequently as once every 24 days when recalculating for only 15 minutes a day. Further, IBM joined Hewlett-Packard in offering to replace flawed Pentium chips at no cost to customers. However, Intel is not expected to supply corrected chips to manufacturers until the first quarter of 1995. [GD]