Xeon chip suffers further delays

A second flaw has been found in Intel's Xeon processor chip, causing shipments to be postponed by a further ten days.

The release of the high-end workstation and server chip has already been delayed by two weeks because of a bug which prevented four-way configuration. Intel said a fault affecting systems that use Error Correcting Code (ECC) memory was discovered whilst fixing the first errata. The latest fault can cause some chips to occasionally report false data errors.

A spokesman for Intel echoed the sentiments of Joe D'Elia, associate director at Dataquest, who told Silicon News last month: "Media coverage of the problems with Xeon has been overblown. With the complexity of chips today, it's becoming harder and harder to come out with the perfect testing suite."

The spokesman said: "With a product this complex we send it out with the intention of finding problems, and the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) knows that. None of the bugs have caused corruption of data. We have a patch that we are sending out to OEMs which will fix the bug at the Bios level."