It’s never a good thing for a major manufacturer to recall a flawed chip, especially if the manufacturer is named Intel. But that’s just what happened in 1994 when the discovery of a miscalculation caused Intel to call back its Pentium chip at a cost to the company of some $420 million. The flaw was infinitesimal but multiplied by the factors that scientists need to send satellites to Jupiter or rockets to huts containing terrorists, the error was intolerable.

With billions of dollars at stake, it’s no wonder that Pentium has tested the hell out of the Nehalem, the chip it’s releasing today, according to John Markoff in the New York Times. To visualize the 731 million transistors packed into roughly the same space as the current generation of chips, an Intel executive used the simile of shrinking the land mass and complexity of Europe to something the size of Ithaca, New York. And I once got lost in Ithaca, New York.

What does Nehalem mean? For one thing it’s a town in Oregon 73.54 miles from Hillsboro, Oregon where Intel’s labs have been putting the new chip through its paces. Why do I suspect an Intel executive lives in Nehalem?

Or the word is simply Melahen spelled backwards.

At any rate, if the chip is all it’s hyped to be it would be a huge boost for American technology, which could use a good boost right about now. So good luck to Intel.

RC