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."

Comments

Remember the good 'ole days

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Keep the Taint

[noidentity]

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.

Re:Keep the Taint

[PitaBred]

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.