A tiny flaw in one of the world's most advanced computer chips, the Pentium, has turned into a big public relations crisis for manufacturer Intel as owners worry that their brand-new computers don't know arithmetic.


Intel, the world's largest chipmaker ahead of rivals such as Motorola and IBM, maintains that the flaw -- which leads to errors in highly precise "floating-point" calculations -- is so small that the average computer user will never encounter it. The company has already corrected the problem in the latest version of the chip.


But owners of Pentium-based computers, which according to Intel number between 10,000 and 15,000 in Russia alone, continue to flood computer billboards worldwide with complaints and proofs of the chip's shortcomings, as well as concerns over legal liability and loss of resale value.


"I never dreamed I had to check the math on a $3,500 computer," said one unidentified user on the Internet, a global network of computer users.


Another, a stockbroker, said: "I run a managed futures operation that uses proprietary mathematical modeling. All losses in the last six months are now suspect to 'wrong' calculations. This is a figure in the high six figure amount, and I have now heard from 12 clients wanting to know if we use Pentium chips, and they request us to not trade or evaluate their funds with this chip."


Users have also criticized Intel for waiting until November to admit that the chip was flawed -- more than six months after the company discovered the bug during ongoing testing.


The uproar has prompted a unique on-line dialogue between Intel's CEO, Andrew Grove, and disgruntled consumers.


"I read through some of the postings and it's clear that ... some of you are very angry at us," Grove said in an Internet message.


"We would like to find all users of the Pentium processor who are engaged in work involving heavy duty scientific/floating point calculations and resolve their problem in the most appropriate fashion including, if necessary, by replacing their chips with new ones."


The problem exists in the floating-point unit of the processor, which has been demonstrated to commit small errors in division with specific pairs of numbers, reducing the precision of calculations. It would not affect operations such as text retrieval and processing, most database applications, or file transfer functions performed by a network file server.


Intel has no plans to undertake a full recall of the chip, and company representatives in Russia said that they plan to continue selling the flawed version, which is indistinguishable from its successor.


"In our own extensive testing, we have not found an application which produces the error," said Stephen Chase, Intel's regional manager for the former Soviet Union area.


Dmitry Lebedinsky, marketing manager for IBS, the largest importer of Dell computers in Russia, agreed: "We have a lot of experience with Pentiums in servers and workstations, and we distributed this information to our customers. None of them has reported any problem."