SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) on Monday said it has temporarily halted shipment of its new 3 Gigahertz Pentium 4 processor after detecting a problem in a small number of chips.
The chips "possibly could not be performing to specification," said Intel spokeswoman Laura Anderson.
Intel said earlier on Monday that it was rolling out the new Pentium 4, with an 800 Megahertz system bus, and a new 875P chipset, aimed at the high end of the computing market.
Anderson said the chipset is not affected by the anomaly found in the processors, which serve as the brains of computers.
Santa Clara, California-based Intel is working with its customers and could not release further details about the problem, according to Anderson.
Halting the shipments of the processors would likely affect the availability of new systems based on the chip, Intel said.
The new processor and integrated chipset will allow people to make an Internet phone call while streaming digital music, said Intel, the world's largest maker of semiconductors.
"I would speculate that this is not a first order of magnitude issue or it would have shown up in testing much earlier in the process," said Thomas Thornhill of UBS Warburg.