Intel’s new chip flaw a costly mistake

[vbironchef]

By MarketWatch
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Intel Corp. surprised investors Monday with news that it has found a design flaw found in a support chip that works with its ballyhooed new chip, code-named Sandy Bridge, and it has to replace systems in the market. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/intels ... _news_stmp

[skier]

by skier » Mon Jan 31, 2011 1:23 pm

what I really want to know is the severity of the degredation

hard drives have always been and always will be the slowest part of a PC, and they've always degraded over time, and with additional usage, who knows if this will even affect Hard drive users, instead just the SSD users

[skier]

also some sense from XS:

I wonder why people think there are "good" and "bad" boards out there or that somehow some of the early boards are unaffected.

Of course not.

Every shipped Sandy Bridge board is bad - it is a chipset design issue. The first fixed chipset hasn't yet rolled out of the production line (and will not do so for some weeks).

The issue affected only "some" of the boards/chipsets shipped in Q4 because most of the shipped hardware was old tech (LGA1156 etc.). Only a fraction of the chipset shipments in Q4 were for Series 6 chipsets. The statements about only boards shipped after Jan 9th reflect the fact that no sandy boards should have been in end user hands before that date - of course this does not reflect the reality, but that doesn't mean any boards before that date are somehow fine - they are not.

Luckily only SATA ports 2-5 appear to have the issue so if you stick to the two 6GB ports (0-1) and/or any non-intel-chipset ports (on boards that have separate Marvell chip for extra SATA ports), you can work around the problem.

[vbironchef]

If it were me I would want new parts. A recall is a recall. Going to cost Intel some serious cash. Stock price in getting hit today. As far as a new motherboard, I would want a new one of those as well.

[DragonFury]

Errors or bad batches or problems happen to all manufacturers. It is how that manufacturer handles these defunct products is what makes 'em good, great or all fookered. I think Intel responded fairly fast to a growing problem they were having with a new chipset.

[Sttm]

It does not even seem that bad of an issue, so kudos to Intel for taking the hit on it. The average consumer probably is only using 2 sata ports anyway and it seems that not all of them were bad.

I wonder if they could do a $50 rebate or some such instead of a motherboard swap for those people only running a single hard drive, dvd off the 2 good sata-2 ports or are using the sata 3 ports or have a 3rd party controller on the board. Id hate to have to send my motherboard back or pay full price for less features if I was one of them.