IN AN embarrassing confession, the US-
based Intel Corp, one of the world's
giants in microprocessor technology,
has admitted that a snag in the software
used to measure the speed of Pentium
microchips, caused it to exaggerate the
chips' processing speed by an estimated
10 per cent.
The error was discovered by its us
competitor, Motorola Inc in the first
week of January. The claims of speed of
the chips was made on models of
Pentiums of at least 100 megahertz since
last September and on Pentium Pro chips since last November. Reportedly,
the error was caused by a bug in the software written by Intel to achieve maximum test speeds in a test called
SPEcint92.
Says Linley Gwennap, editor of
Microprocessor Report, a newsletter published from California, that the Intel
episode will hopefully lead to third-
party testing of microprocessor and to
checking of the standards used to predict the chip's speeds. "Because there is
so much at stake for these companies,
there is a natural temptation if not to
cheat, then to push the rules as far as
possible regardless of whether an average person would see that level of performance," he observes.
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