Wall Street major Smith Barney has demanded that IBM Corp replace flawed Pentium chips in some 600 personal computers with new processors flown in directly from Intel Corp manufacturing plants, according to the December 26 issue of InformationWeek, which goes onto newstands today: the Manhattan broker, one of IBM’s biggest customer sites, is taking the processor flaw very seriously because of Securities & Exchange Commissions regulations that demand an extremely high degree of computational accuracy; shortly after Thanksgiving, IBM conducted a week-long check of 600 Pentium machines at Smith Barney, and replaced 200 chips with new Pentium processors; an IBM source says the remaining 400 chips will be replaced by the end of December.
