The company faces two problems: it must recall 3,900 machines because of defective chips, and customers are waiting for new models.

Some of the defective chips were later turned into key rings by Intel.

As for hands-on management, he said, "I don't fix yield problems," referring to problems with defective chips.

With sixty four chips per wafer, there are still four defective chips that must be thrown out.

Intel can make fewer chips per wafer of silicon, and the larger size creates more defective chips.

The revenue from the remaining working chips has to pay for the entire cost of the wafer and its processing, including those discarded defective chips.

Thus measuring leakage, or Iddq testing, is a quick, inexpensive method finding defective chips.

"But it's very important for us to reduce the number of defective chips and recoup our investment, and we think we can easily do that."

Evidently my brother's new box came with one of those defective chips that makes errors when the numbers get really big.

If you buy memory, install it properly and your computer begins to crash, there's a chance you might have a defective chip.