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

Keep the Taint

[Sponge Bath]

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.

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

[xMrFishx]

Nah most consumers will be completely oblivious, and as stated, will not affect that many people. OEMs will just not use/block off the faulty ports and carry on as normal. The faulty boards for consumer space (system builders) will probably only count for a microscopic number of boards made at the start of production and will just get recalled and thrown at OEMs for closed-box systems. System builders really don't count for that many sales, and they're really the few that care. As long as the OEMs can cope with it, which they can, all will be fine.

Re:Keep the Taint

[peterd11]

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.

Re:Keep the Taint

[Andy Dodd]

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.

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.

Re:Huh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I strongly suspect that laptops will be the big one here.

Virtually all laptops, excluding on a few high end workstation/gamer beasts, are 1HDD and (still common; but getting rarer) 1 optical drive. And, in a laptop, there isn't exactly much room to monkey with the shipping configuration...

Given that Intel has held the crown for reasonably high performance at laptop-friendly TDPs, I'm assuming that laptop makers would really like to get their hands on the latest silicon so that their roadmaps stay mostly accurate.

Small form factor and very small form factor desktops may also want in, for the same reasons. If you can only physically fit 2 drives in the case, only having 2 ports isn't a huge issue(Joe Tweaker who wants to put one of those 4-2.5inch-trays-in-one-5.25inch-bay devices in place of the optical drive will have to suffer; but nobody else will care...

It will be more interesting; but less certain, to see if production of standard motherboards resumes. By all accounts, the built-in intel SATA ports are(when working) competitive or better than most outboard ones cheap enough to integrate on a mass-market motherboard, plus they don't eat PCIe lanes. From a design perspective, it'd be easy enough to not solder headers for the faulty ports, and leave people with just the 6GB/s chipset ports and 4-6 provided by a 3rd party controller; but it remains to be seen if that will be acceptable to enthusiasts...

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:Remember the good 'ole days

[operagost]

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.

Makes sense. Laptops for example.

[DarthVain]

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!

Most folks don't know what is in a computer anyway

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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."

Re:Awesome!

[Daniel Phillips]

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.

More garbage titles...thanks!

[sitkill]

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.