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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."
I'm sure there's a list of affected processors with the range of serial #s. Something easy to check.
The defect is not in the processors, although people are going to be confused about that. The defect is in the Cougar Point P67 and H67 support chipsets.
Oh, but it's even better than that, from the manufacturer's point of view. The SATA flaw will take time to actually surface, and even then it'll only gradually make your machine unworkable, so by that time you'll be out of warranty, and the manufacturer won't care.
This is highly relevant to my interests as I embarked upon an upgrade crusade about a week ago to replace my aging PC
I'm very happy with my four core Phenom II. Powerful, quiet, cheap - pick all three.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
To clarify, Windows 98 couldn't use more than 512 MB because of a bug in the disk cache. All you had to do was lock the cache to 512 MB max and you could use 2 GB of RAM. If you didn't, the system would (ironically) throw up out-of-memory errors immediately. I won't rule out that some idiot at a mom'n'pop shop built Windows 98 boxes with faulty RAM figuring it would never be used by the average Joe, but they weren't taking advantage of any Windows quirk.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It's simple - The manufacturer needs to commit to a situation where there is NO way a user can connect anything to the affected ports. Which is what Intel is requiring them to do.
Most low to midrange laptops are in this category - They have only two SATA devices (one hard drive, one optical drive), and no physical provisions for adding another. These laptops could contain a defective chip and it would not make ANY difference because there is no way to connect to the affected SATA ports. (Higher-end laptops support dual hard drives or eSATA and we won't see this with SNB unless they fall into the next category...)
A manufacturer can also produce a motherboard that uses the chipset SATA for the first two ports and an offboard controller for any additional ones - Manufacturers were probably doing this already in order to offer six 6 Gbps SATA ports instead of 2 6 gig and 4 3 gig ports. Users with a configuration like this also will not ever be affected by the issue.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
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