Intel Confirms Bug In New Pentium Chip

Intel Corp. on Friday confirmed its Pentium Pro and just-released Pentium II chips have a minor math bug, but said it hasn’t immediately devised a way to fix the problem.

Intel said it expects the bug will affect very few applications.

Unlike its controversial handling of a similar flaw in an earlier chip in 1994, Intel this past week publicly acknowledged the bug soon after learning of it. In addition, Intel on Friday released statements of support from major software makers, including the three biggest - Microsoft, IBM and Computer Associates - saying that so far they haven’t seen any problems with the bug.

Intel, confirming reports of the flaw, said the problem related to operations that convert floating point numbers - which express a number in two components, the significant digits and an exponent, without using a fixed decimal point - into integers, or whole numbers. The chip is supposed to issue an “overflow” warning when large floating point numbers will not fit into the integer format, but in certain circumstances it apparently failed to do so.