Earlier today Intel officially announced its first processor that supports 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, the Pentium 4 3.0GHz. It came to a surprise when the company acknowledged that it will temporary delay the shipping of its new chip from releasing into the commercial market.

According to various reports, the company had found that the Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus “had been behaving strangely” during validation testing and decided to postpone the commercial launch. The company’s spokesperson George Alfs confirmed that the reason of the delay lies exactly in technology, but not issues with marketing or overall market situation. Unfortunately, he denied giving any exact dates of the availability of the delayed part, but said the company will ship the processor as soon as possible.

In 1000-unit quantities, the 3.0GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with the Hyper-Threading technology and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus is priced at $417 and will be available as soon as possible. Companion chipset, the i875P, is currently shipping in volume to a variety of mainboard manufacturers worldwide and is priced at $53 with integrated software RAID, $50 without RAID.

Recently we told you that Intel plans to roll out a new D-1 core stepping for its Pentium 4 processors. According to this official document from Intel, the D-1 core adds impedance pin functionality to support 800MHz platforms. The chip tested by us was actually a D-1, hence, we can make some assumptions in regards availability of such CPUs if all such processors will utilise the same core stepping. Intel said in its document about D-1 processors that it will start to send samples of the D-1 chips on April, 25, 2003, while the first 3.06GHz Pentium 4 processors based on the D-1 core are scheduled to be available on the 9th of May, and the 2.80GHz and below CPUs are set to come on the 27th of June. If the information is correct, we will not see the Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 800MHz QPB chip for a while. But in fact we do have one of such processors in our hands here at X-bit labs, so, Intel does supply such CPUs now. So, unfortunately, we still cannot say when the processors with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus are slated to come.