Spokesmen for the companies, however, say that hardly any clients have demanded that their chips be replaced.
Intel, the producer of one of the world's most advanced processors, announced last week that it would replace the chips, which have been shown to produce errors in some highly precise "floating-point" calculations. The company maintains that the average user stands almost no chance of encountering the mistake, and has since corrected the flaw in an updated chip.
Intel's branch in Russia, as well as producers and distributors of Pentium-based computers, are following through on the pledge here, offering unconditional replacements of the defective chip to users here no matter how they obtained their computers.
"About 10 to 15 people come to our office every day to find out about the processor," Vsevolod Predtechensky, Intel's Pentium field application engineer in Russia, said in a telephone interview. "But about 80 percent of them simply want information about the capability of the chip. None of them has suffered from the error."
According to Intel, between 10,000 and 15,000 Pentium processors have been sold in Russia in the last 18 months. But Predtechensky said most of them tend to be used as network servers rather than personal computers and do not produce the error.
Yury Studenikin, a product manager for Acer, a computer manufacturer and distributor that has sold some 500 Pentium-based machines here, said that just two customers had contacted the company's Russian office. "One of them wanted his chip replaced because he uses it for scientific research," Studenikin said. "The other was just curious what kind of an error it was."
Both Studenikin and Predtechensky said their companies hoped to be able to bring in the new chips in January.
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