At CES 2011, Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors took center stage, dominating laptop announcements and quickly winning over our hearts. Unfortunately, today Intel confirmed a serious bug in the Cougar Point chipset that will delay desktop PCs using its Sandy Bridge processors.
According to Intel, series 6 i5 and i7 chips are affected by the Sandy Bridge flaw. A flaw which gradually degrades the performance of the SATA ports over time, eventually affecting the speed of hard drives and optical drives. In order to fix the problem, the hardware needs to be adjusted at the factory — a software update will not do the trick.
So here’s the deal — under normal testing the flaw in the Cougar Point chipset did not manifest itself. Subsequent, extreme stress testing revealed that under normal usage, the problem would become noticeable after “two to four years”. Rather than waiting, Intel wants to address the issue now and prevent a future recall of chipsets.
Since only quad core i5 and i7 chips are affected by the Sandy Bridge flaw, Intel does not expect the problem to hurt its full-year revenue and an updated version of the chips are scheduled for late February. Nevertheless, Intel cut its first quarter revenue forecast by $300 million and expects the total cost to repair and replace the chips to be about $700 million.
With Intel processors being used by 80 percent of the world’s PCs, the defect in the Cougar Point chipset affecting Sandy Bridge processors is quite unfortunate. We’ve heard rumors that Apple would update their iMac and MacBook pro lines “very soon”, so hopefully Intel sorts things out sooner rather than later. Tell us what you think about the Sandy Bridge flaw. Is the AMD Fusion technology now a more attractive proposition?
via Reuters
