'Anomalies' Fixed, New Pentium 4 Shipping

One week after delaying shipment of its latest Pentium 4 processor with 800-MHz bus speeds, Intel says it has corrected "anomalies" found during testing and is beginning to ship the new 3-GHz processor and 875P chipset in volume.

Intel discovered that a "small number" of processors were sending incorrect data to the rest of the system during the final stage of testing, a company spokesman said. Intel has corrected this problem by loading new code into the motherboard into which the CPU plugs.

This latest Pentium 4 increases bus speed over the previous Pentium 4 from 533 MHz to 800 MHz. The previous Pentium 4, which runs at 3.06 GHz, began shipping in November.

The 875P chipset, code-named Canterwood, is designed specifically to support Intel's Hyper-Threading technology. It also supports dual-channel DDR 400-MHz system memory, a performance enhancer for multimedia and 3-D intensive apps.

The 875P chipset features Performance Acceleration technology, which speeds data flow between the processor and system memory, as well as a dedicated networking bus based on Intel's Communications Streaming Architecture. This architecture works with the new Intel PRO/1000 CT Desktop Connection to double Gigabit Ethernet networking bandwidth currently available on PCI bus-based products.

The 875P also includes a high-performance AGP8X graphics interface, integrated Hi-Speed USB 2.0 and Serial ATA, built-in RAID capabilities with a Serial ATA interface for accelerated disk input/output, and dual independent DMA audio engines that let a user make a PC phone call while playing digital music streams.