THERE is a perverse reassurance in the discovery that occasionally the new religion of computer technology can be fallible. The giant Intel company, one of the front-runners on the congested electronic superhighway, had to ease back on the accelerator this week when it voluntarily admitted that the retrieval speed of its advanced Pentium microprocessor was 10 per cent slower that previously thought. Apparently the fault lies not in the chip itself but in the software used to determine the performance of the Pentium unit.
While the response of the chip may be slower, at least the company was creditably up to speed in admitting the problem. Accessing its memory banks, Intel has seemingly learned a public relations lesson from a previous costly technical flaw two years ago when the Pentium chip was relatively new to the market. The company initially played down the importance of the fault but when major customers such as IBM indicated their displeasure, Intel agreed to replace all flawed Pentium chips, an exercise which cost £298 million.