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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."
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 $100 off retail, and I'm guessing it was returned because of this whole fiasco. I'm just loathe to have it sit around as a paperweight until at least April!
There is simply too much glass..
when companies did this stuff and didn't tell us? When XP hit those upgrade installs were blowing up because the big manufactures stuck bad RAM into Win98 boxes knowing it would never be used (Windows 98 won't used RAM past 256M unless you hack the registry, it'll use the page file instead). Well, the XP install copies the whole disk into RAM before copying it out to disk, so BOOM, there goes your XP install. Usually couldn't recover.
At any rate, this is just great. I'm sure the lower end manufactures will be just pleased as punch to make sure those broken ports don't get used. You know, if it made it into production it must work just well enough to blame the problems on the OS when you call for a warranty swap.
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Assuming Intel fixes (or has already done so) their documentation for this run of chips, how is this any different than a chip not performing beyond its specs? It's like days past when they shipped an FPU-less CPU, when it was really the FPU model but with defects in the FPU. In this case, it's part of the I/O system. Again, assuming they spec these chips as just not having this part of the I/O system. Presumably the ones with this part working will have a clearly-different part number that can easily be determined by looking at the chip. I just don't see the problem.
Given that discrete SATA upgrade cards are in the 20$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....
Disable it in BIOS, remove the physical ports, update the specs. Sure it'll be an odd configuration to only ship with 2 SATA ports, but it won't be a "taint". I'd be very surprised if after all this, Intel will let OEMs ship machines with faulty ports. Personally I wouldn't mind a 4 port SATA card that I could bring along to my next machine.
In fact, I'm surprised that Intel hasn't made a cheap SATA controller of their own, the cheapest 4-port controller card I can find costs 313,- NOK while you can get a full H67 motherboard with 6 ports for 667,- NOK. Discrete controller cards are extremely overpriced.
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And it's entirely Intel's own damn fault for forcing other chipset makers out of the game. There are plenty of companies that would make Intel chipsets, but Intel doesn't want them to and refuses to grant licenses necessary to make them.
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