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Intel Resumes Shipping of Faulty Sandy Bridge Chip
arcticstoat writes "After causing chaos among motherboard makers by revealing a flaw in its 6-series motherboard chipsets, Intel has announced plans to recommence shipments of the faulty silicon, before the fixed chips have even started shipping. Intel claims it decided to start reshipping the chipsets after lengthy discussions with computer manufacturers. "As a result of these discussions and specific requests from computer makers,' says the company, 'Intel is resuming shipments of the Intel 6-series chipset for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue." The announcement follows Intel's recent exposure of a well publicised design fault that affects the 3Gbps SATA ports (typically ports 2 to 5) in Intel's P67 and H67 chipsets. As such, we assume that the new systems based on the faulty chipsets will either come with a separate SATA controller card, or that they will only use the two (unaffected) 6Gbps SATA ports provided by the chipset."
"for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue" So they check your build spec before allowing you to buy?
This will confuse people and make them wary of Sandy Bridge based machines for years. "Is this box tainted? I don't know, and the manufacturer won't tell me. I guess I'll buy something else." A nice clean break of recalling *all* defective machines and shipping only good silicon would have been better.
"We have found that if the todlers do not eat the paint, they are in no danger."
Don't blame Intel. Blame the motherboard makers that demanded this. They are the ones who insist on shipping products that are crippled down to only having 2 onboard SATA ports.
This is highly relevant to my interests as I embarked upon an upgrade crusade about a week ago to replace my aging PC (circa 2008 tech). I had just got caught up on all the new architecture, and then I read about the recall. Massive bummer. I'm still going to hold off until the fixed boards actually still coming out since I have a bunch of SATA drives and I do not want the trade off of a discrete SATA card taking up one of the slots, but it was mighty tempting to go get an i5 2600K that our local PC store had labeled on it's website as a return... for $125.
Heck, I may still go check it out (if it's still there) as that's at least $100 off retail, and I'm guessing it was returned because of this whole fiasco. I'm just loathe to have it sit around as a paperweight until at least April!
There is simply too much glass..
when companies did this stuff and didn't tell us? When XP hit those upgrade installs were blowing up because the big manufactures stuck bad RAM into Win98 boxes knowing it would never be used (Windows 98 won't used RAM past 256M unless you hack the registry, it'll use the page file instead). Well, the XP install copies the whole disk into RAM before copying it out to disk, so BOOM, there goes your XP install. Usually couldn't recover.
At any rate, this is just great. I'm sure the lower end manufactures will be just pleased as punch to make sure those broken ports don't get used. You know, if it made it into production it must work just well enough to blame the problems on the OS when you call for a warranty swap.
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As long as the systems are advertised as only having 2 SATA ports, I fail to see what the problem is. If someone is foolish enough to do the research and conclude that their are more ports without doing enough research to discover those ports don't actually work, that's their problem.
If a Laptop uses a faulty chipset, but is only configured to use the two 6GB SATA ports, it will be entirely unaffected by the bug, as it only effects the 3GB SATA ports. Since there is really no way for the consumer to actually use the 3GB ports, it will never have the bug problem.
So yes in cases like that, it makes sense to keep shipping. Those laptops are perfectly fine.
When I read the title I was a bit leery until I thought about it for a second. I know when I buy my new desktop one eventually, I don't want there to be a chance I get a faulty one!
For high-end systems with a hardware raid controller (battery-backed write caches are nice for databases) this shouldn't be a problem; or am I missing something.
So long as it is priced accordingly (i.e. discount) and the specifications are transparent (i.e. they don't try to trick people), then that is fine, I can base my decision to buy on features, which will include one less PCI slot than others due to extra card etc...
If I was Intel, I would be hesitant to do this however (outside of laptops that are unaffected), as it is ripe for possible abuse by less reputable manufactures, and in the end it will be Intel's reputation at stake.
Given that discrete SATA upgrade cards are in the 20$ish range, I'd assume that adding an SATA controller directly to the motherboard would run maybe half that. I assume that any motherboard makers shipping will just leave the faulty ports without the headers soldered on, and tack on a 3rd party SATA controller(something that many were already doing).
Unfortunately, that will(in some ways) be worse and more confusing than the straight crippling. With the chipset ports, basically all motherboards of a given chipset will get the same performance out of those ports. With a 3rd party controller, performance will be substantially variable; based on how many PCIe lanes they give the controller, and who makes it(anybody who remembers the god-awful JMicron[seriously, what is it with JMicron? their IDE controllers sucked ass, and then so did their SSD controller chips...] IDE controllers that some motherboard makers started using when Intel's chipsets went SATA-only should be getting nervous right about now...)
For 1-2 drive only systems, like laptops and very small form factor systems, no problem. The two good chipset ports will do just fine. For motherboards purporting to offer more, though, you'll have to really do your reading before you buy....
1. These chipsets have at least one known major flaw.
2. Based upon an EOMs configuration the 'problems' should not be encountered.
Question: Do you ever plan on changing your PCs configuration? Add a harddrive? Expand it?
Don't risk it. I'm putting a one year hold on buying Dirty Bridge products.
Although us geekier types read, "recommence shipments of the faulty silicon," and scream, "Well that's a fine idea of how to get rid of a warehouse of faulty chips!"
Didn't we have this with Intel already, with floating point division? Oh, yeah, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug .
And Devo did a song about it, years before it happened:
"When chip bug comes along . . . you must ship it! Ship it! Ship it good!"
I wonder if the sales kid at your local super-computer store will inform you, "Oh, by the way, this model has a faulty chip." Or, maybe a sticker on the computer: "Faulty Intel Chip Inside!" That should do wonders for sales.
I remember that once the floating point division problem got mainstream press coverage, folks got all ornery, despite statements from Intel that most users would never see this problem. Most folks don't even know what floating point is. Intel eventually bought off the math prof who discovered the bug, by giving him testing contract. He deserved it, because he did a damn good job tracking down the bug. He is really, "a geek's geek."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Well, if newer boards ship with a third-party controller to bypass the 3GB issue, we're set there too.
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THANK GOD!!!
with the low pci-e lanes and pci-e based usb3 there not a lot of room to add pci-e sata cards and the pci-e x1 cards don't have a lot of bandwidth to work with.
Gigabit LAN also uses pci-e
also some boards also have a pci-e to pci chip on them as well.
Even if a board has light peak it will likely need 2-4+ pci-e lanes so 4+20? is not much with video at 16.
1) They physically remove the SATA connectors for the affected ports from the board, AND;
2) They spin a version of the BIOS that permanently disables these ports in the logic and track it separately from the main line, AND;
3) They make it impossible to load the main line BIOS into the board, allowing the ports to be enabled, AND;
4) They seriously discount the price of the boards for the loss of functionality. Even if they include a PCI-e SATA card, it will not come close to the performance of the native controller, and it will consume one of the PCI-e slots.
Do we really have to keep calling this a Sandy Bridge issue? This isn't a sandy bridge issue, the name Sandy bridge is for the CPU. The issue is NOT with the CPU, it's with the chipset Cougar point. The Sandy Bridge is (so far) perfectly fine, and has no issues at all. Of course, I guess "Intel Resumes Shipping of Faulty Cougar Point chip" doesn't seem as catastrophic.
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Anyone complaining about this would do well to consider that many of us have purchased dual and triple-core processors with 1-2 cores disabled. Is the chip defective? Technically. Did you get what you paid for? Yes.
0/10 lame troll is lame... the division bug was a part of the chip that could be used in every computer that shipped with the chip. This bug only happens when you wire something up to specific pins. I don't see too many people doing the kind of SMT rework necessary to use these pins on motherboards that never had them hooked up in the first place.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This makes me laugh. I'm sure the INTEL shareholders sure wish NVIDIA and VIA were making chipsets now, but since INTEL is the ONLY chipset maker for their CPUs they can't sell any CPUs right now. Intel is a CPU company that can't sell CPUs.
Hey INTEL, I went to a business school.... you now know about the risks of vertical integration. If you control all of your requirements and channels you better do a damn good job or you can hang yourself. This is a wonderful cautionary tale for all businesses.
Let's take a step back and look at what SATA 6 Gbps actually offers: 6 Gbps signal rate. Do the usual Shitachi or Fushitsu hard drives favored by OEMs even come close to 6 Gbps ? No. They can't even hit 1 Gbps, but they're inexpensive and most of the time the PC around them is limited in countless other ways.
Even a high-end, performance-oriented hard drive will barely scratch the ceiling of first-gen SATA's 1.5Gbps, so your little gamer friend is also not seeing any tangible benefit from SATA 6Gbps.
So this leaves two very small niches: SSDs which already hit the 3Gbps mark, and port multipliers. I pity the fool who drops a small fortune on a port multiplier enclosure, only to plug it into a low-cost Sandy Bridge PC. As for the SSDs, well you still need to buy a special one whose controller also runs at 6Gbps, and surprise: none of the OEMs ship these yet. Heck, they rarely offer anything better than an Intel X25M or old-stock Corsair/Kingston, which top out at 2Gbps on a good day.
So really, Intel continuing to ship these B-grade boards to select OEMs is simply common sense. The people who might be affected by the tainted SATA ports 3 years down the road, do not even figure in the target demographic. It's not like these boards will wind up in mission-critical systems, and there's still the OEM's warranty to handle any lemons down the road.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Sometimes this isn't well advertised. I was looking at Atom motherboards for a NAS recently, and there's one that looks perfect, with six SATA ports. Unless you actually check the manual, you don't learn that four of these are actually a single SATA channel and a port splitter, so they appear to be a single SATA drive to the OS.
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Does this remind anyone of Capacitor Plague? Look at the resale prices of potentially affected Dells to get an idea of the impact of these kinds of decisions. There will be all of these hardware rev numbers and manufacturers won't be forthcoming with information on which units have which. It's ridiculous.
Well, most average users have a 97 gazillion TB drive that came with the machine anyway so won't need the other drives. On the other hand... they probably don't need the power of the sandy bridge in the first place.
But an experienced user will have multiple drives. Simply because it's safer. Losing one drive means you only lose data on that one drive. As far as the C drive... I'd love to have a 500g drive for that since it's all anyone would need. (Try to find one!) The only thing that should be on the C drive is the OS. Especially if/when you run into problems and have to format and reinstall. Bigger ain't always better.
Sandy bridge is not that much faster then a Core 2 machine, in fact the i7 was roughly on 40% faster at most, in the majority of applications. The Sandybridge as of this time is just i7 redux with slightly higher clockspeeds.
No one should need to upgrade until you see at least double the performance of a core 2 machine unless one is doing specialized work where every gain is important to the task/business.
The issue, I think, it that Intel has no plans to replace Sandy Bridge with a new architecture any time soon.. so public impression is of long-term importance here. If Sandy Bridge was just a small step towards a major revision then that would be one thing, but instead Sandy Bridge *is* a major revision and they will be stuck with it for a very long time.
Now add in that AMD is putting out its own major revision in two months (the first in many many years), and all the signs currently indicate that they will have offerings on par with i7 performance. Intel is afraid of AMD because when left unchallenged AMD proved that in the desktop marketplace, it is very easy to lose market share very quickly (AMD roared to 50% market share when Intel was bumbling around wih P4's, and there is some question as to how much of the remaining 50% Intel actually deserved vs how much was due to its anti-competitive backroom deals which it was convicted of)
AMD hasnt been much of a threat in the desktop space because they have been a generation behind on process technology, and additionally opted not to do any major revisions while it was folding the ATI acquisition into its business. But here it is.. process size parity and a major revision just a few months away.. Intel cannot tolerate a long term hit to the brand, with customers for years wondering if they are getting a "good" or "bad" chipset with their purchase.
"His name was James Damore."
Good god. First it's sad there's an idiot big enough to make such a retarded comment. But the idea that there exists an idiot big enough to mod this post Insightful makes me sad. And not just "Oh, I didn't win the lottery this week sad", I mean "everyone I love just died and I have been captured by terrorists who plan to torture me to death" sad.
The capacitor issue was pervasive and took years for the problems to manifest themselves.
Since the failed parts were made by a third-party, many computer makers were hesitant to acknowledge the problem as their responsibility. At the same time, a complete lack of part traceability (due to a gray market for things like capacitors) meant that manufacturers could not easily point fingers, so they kept quiet until more information was available.
This failed chipset is made by Intel, and is used only in Intel systems. The failure was introduced late in the product development cycle, and not enough testing was done on the final silicon (it was assumed that earlier intensive tests were enough). Intel is supporting a full no-questions-asked recall of all boards sold before the product was pulled from the market, and they are working through both major retailers and manufactuers.
In my case, Newegg sent an email guaranteeing an extension of the return period until they release new silicon, and that they will supply me a new replacement board at that time. Most board manufactures have also publicly announced replacement plans for those users who have no easy way to return their board to the original point of purchase (some have even pledged free return shipping as well).
If Intel continues to ship the 67-series chipsets, they should have no further issues if the 3Gbps SATA ports are disabled. Since many manufacturers already have "enthusiast" motherboards with 2-4 additional 6Gbps SATA ports, a quick price cut could make these boards attractive even with half the ports disabled. There could be other flaws in the rest of the chipset, but you take that chance with every new computer you purchase.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
This is Intel's fault all the way.
Here's an article that describes the problem in pretty simple terms.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4143/the-source-of-intels-cougar-point-sata-bug
It appears to only affect the 3gb SATA, and not the 6gb.
I suspect manufacturers will buy these cheap and just not implement the 3gb SATA feature, at least those that understand the problem.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
It's the laptops that will suffer if the manufacturer of the system doesn't know about the bug. That'll mean dead systems for the most part for anyone buying a board that uses the 3gb SATA only on those laptop motherboards.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I think this is a bad idea, i think its just asking for a counterfeit market to spring up once the new chips are out there will certainly be someone using a cheap tainted discontinued chip and tooting it as the new version.
Ford will be restart selling the Pinto?
Don't worry, there's only an issue if you get rear-ended, avoid that and you'll never have any problems!
Hmm... interesting, that same advice applies when in prison too.
~Syberz
.. we soon see new, cheap H67/P67 motherboards with only 4 SATA ports; two 6 Gbps and two 3 Gbps, of which the two 3 Gbps internally switch to non-used SATA ports, once one starts giving more than a few errors per day?
That way, the issue wouldn't show up for maybe 5-7 years; so far down the road that any warranty would be long expired.
This behaviour would probably be very noticeable for people running some Unix-like OS, but to Windows users, I'm not even sure if a reboot would be required to make the drive accessible again, unless it's the drive where the system boots from.
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The more I read about this the more it seems like Intel really went overboard halting production on everything. For starters this flaw doesn't impact all the SATA ports. For the ports it does impact it only happens in a small % of devices and even in those devices it is a progressive problem (meaning they won't be DOA).
In the UK, the manufacturer has to fix a computer for six years _if the fault was present when the computer was sold_. If the customer buys a computer with a perfectly fine SATA port and it breaks after one year and one day because of bad luck, that's the customer's problem. If the customer buys a computer with a chip that was broken on day one, but only affecting operation after a few years, that is the manufacturer's problem.
Intel is resuming shipments of the Intel 6-series chipset for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue. (...) [those systems] will only use the two (unaffected) 6Gbps SATA ports provided by the chipset
Just like Apple's MacBook Pro's, that use one channel for the HDD/SDD and the other for the SuperDrive.
But would that really bother most people? I'd wager the number of people who want to run 3+ disks (2 x 6 Gbps, 1+ 3 Gbps) at full capacity AND graphics at full capacity are a pretty small number who wouldn't buy these systems to begin with.
FDIV
This probably covers a fair range of desktop machines from the OEM's too. Has anyone here actually looked inside a low-midrange dell/etc lately? Your lucky if there is a PCIe slot much less extra SATA ports.
And here, unlike with the FDIV bug, updating the specs of this controller chip to simply have two fewer ports isn't as major a change. Again, I'm not saying that Intel can get out of compensating people who already bought the chip under the claim that it had 6 working ports; this is about the chips Intel still has, and that work perfectly fine if these two ports aren't used. It would be idiocy to scrap these chips just because people can't grasp the situation.
I have an affected motherboard that I just bought from Microcenter some 3 weeks ago, and didn't even know of the issue until they mailed me notification of the defect and that when a solution has been provided, they'll alert me to it.
From TFA:
"In the meantime, Intel also says it's now started manufacturing new versions of the chipsets with a silicon fix to solve the 3Gbps SATA problems, and that these will start shipping in mid-February. "
There will be no need for a "Faulty Intel Chip" inside logo since its the chipset that has a bug, not the processor.
BY GOD THE PREVIEW IS FUCKING SLOW.
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Which one is that?
In general, don't you think most Atom motherboards are severely crippled in I/O? If you have some handy links from you research for Atom motherboards for a NAS , please post them.
thanks
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It was one of the Zotac ones, I don't remember the exact model. I don't really care about disk I/O throughput, because I expect the bottleneck to the the network - most of the time it's going to be WiFi, so even ATA-33 will be more than enough to saturate it, but I want multiple drives so I can put them in a RAID-Z configuration and have some redundancy (and other nice things like deduplication and snapshots on the NAS).
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