Shipments of Intel's new 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor have been halted Monday due to the discovery of an "anomaly," according to an Intel spokesman.

The new chip, which was announced Monday, was placed on what Intel called "ship hold" because the company detected a problem in "a very small number of the 3 GHz chips," said George Alfs, an Intel spokesman. The 875P chipset, with support for a 800 MHz front-side bus, is unaffected by the anomaly, he said.

"It sounds like whatever it is is relatively minor," said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, who spoke with Intel about the problem earlier Monday. An issue arose during the company's internal testing procedures but it's not something that will require a "silicon spin," or a redesign of the hardware, in order to fix, he said.

"A change may be needed in the BIOS, or a change in a specification. Basically all of that points to it being a relatively small issue, rather than something that would be significant. The delay in shipping product should be relatively short," McCarron said.

Alfs declined to be more specific about the nature of the problem.

Intel is working with its customers on fixing the problem, he said. Units have already been shipped out to PC and workstation manufacturers, and the cessation of shipments likely will affect the availability of several new systems announced Monday featuring the chip, he said.

As of Monday afternoon, Dell, Gateway, and HP were selling PCs and workstations on their Web sites with the 3GHz Pentium 4, Intel's first chip to feature an 800MHz front-side bus. All three companies were trying to determine how Intel's announcement would affect the availability of their systems.

A Gateway representative said Intel told them it did not know when it would be able to deliver the chips, and therefore Gateway couldn't say when its 700XL desktop with the 3GHz processor would become available.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.