Sandy Bridge Design Flaw Forces Recall
This is some disheartening news, Intel has revealed a silicon design flaw in their Sandy Bridge line of CPU’s and Chipsets. After a raving review by Missingremote’s Andy VanTil, hopefully Intel can fix this issue quickly and not delay the further roll-out of the Sandy Bridge line.
Intel said Monday that it discovered a design flaw in a chipset circuit and has “implemented a silicon fix.” The chip giant also said it will work with PC makers to handle returns and repairs.
Specifically, Intel found a design problem in a support chip, the Intel 6 Series, which is code-named Cougar Point. In a nutshell, chipsets with Serial-ATA ports could degrade over time and hurt the performance of hard drives and DVD drives.
Ouch. That’s gonna leave a
Ouch. That’s gonna leave a mark.
Andrew pointed me to another
Andrew pointed me to another link that shows a bit more explanation, in which it seems like this issue more specifically effects the 3G SATA ports. So that’ll be interesting to see how many people are actually affected. This is bad, no doubt…but just imagine if it had been the regular SATA ports.
Mike Garcen wrote:
Andrew
[quote=Mike Garcen]
Andrew pointed me to another link that shows a bit more explanation, in which it seems like this issue more specifically effects the 3G SATA ports. So that’ll be interesting to see how many people are actually affected. This is bad, no doubt…but just imagine if it had been the regular SATA ports.
[/quote]
It affects me and my degrading sata ports! 🙂
Wonder who I need to contact to get on the list? Newegg or Intel!
So far it’s working great since I got the RMA mb & Proceesor back and installed this weekend
Jeff
I wonder how long it will
I wonder how long it will take them to get this sorted? I was planning on doing a rebuild using SB this April. Sounds like this affects motherboards, not CPUs, so we will have to be careful of which motherboards we purchase…
If this is motherboard
If this is motherboard related…why did newegg pull all SB cpus?
I guess it’s a good thing I
I guess it’s a good thing I decided to skip this round of SB hardware and wait for more CPUs and motherboards to come out. 🙂
According to AnandTech:
“The
According to AnandTech:
“The problem in the chipset was traced back to a transistor in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree. The aforementioned transistor has a very thin gate oxide, which allows you to turn it on with a very low voltage. Unfortunately in this case Intel biased the transistor with too high of a voltage, resulting in higher than expected leakage current. Depending on the physical characteristics of the transistor the leakage current here can increase over time which can ultimately result in this failure on the 3Gbps ports. The fact that the 3Gbps and 6Gbps circuits have their own independent clocking trees is what ensures that this problem is limited to only ports 2 – 5 off the controller.”
Well guess it’s a good thing
Well guess it’s a good thing I wasn’t going to start building my sandy bridge system until later this month. I’ll just hold off until this is all sorted out, hopefully my current ancient and ailing machine will hold on that long…
“hopefully my current ancient
Wow! Are you running a socket 939 Athlon 64 4200+ CPU too???
I wonder if that’s why my commercial detection takes so long….
John wrote:
“hopefully my
[quote=John]
Wow! Are you running a socket 939 Athlon 64 4200+ CPU too???
I wonder if that’s why my commercial detection takes so long….
[/quote]
Haha… actually the CPU is the least of my machine’s problems (Core 2 Duo E6750). The rest of the hardware is what’s failing.
Figures. Right after I send
Figures. Right after I send my neighbor an updates shopping list for a new system. It went from AMD to Sandy Bridge and now it depends on how soon he wants to build. I should just stick with AMD since that is what I know and has never failed me.