This is the second flaw that the Santa Clara company has discovered in its chips in the past few weeks. Last month, Intel found a problem in the 3-gigahertz version of its Pentium 4 chip, just as it was being shipped to PC makers. It has since corrected that chip's problems.

The Itanium 2 has been on the market since July. It is aimed at the high-end enterprise server market, where it has been seen as being the core of servers with the same kind of reliability as more costly servers by Sun and others. 

Intel said a customer discovered the problem during lab stress testing. Intel said the problem is an electrical issue that occurs only during a specific sequence of events.

One fix for the problem, Intel said, is to install a new version of the basic input-output system (BIOS) software. This will take the chip's performance down to 800 megahertz, instead of 900 megahertz or 1 gigahertz, the Itanium 2's rated clock speeds.

Intel said it can offer customers a test to see if their chips are affected by the problem, and they can swap out the chip for a new one, or wait for the next upgrade of Itanium, code-named Madison, which is expected later this year.

Computer makers had varied responses to the problem. IBM told Bloomberg News that it is delaying plans to sell an Itanium 2-based server until the company is confident the flaw is fixed. IBM has sold ``a handful'' of the x450 server computers so far and had planned to make them generally available soon.

A Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman said the company is working closely with Intel to identify its customers who might have chips with the problem.

By: DocMemory
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