Sandy Bridge Chipset Shipments Halted Due To Bug 212
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Early adopters of Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors, beware. Intel has discovered a flaw in the 6-series chipsets that accompany the new processors. The flaw causes Serial ATA performance to 'degrade over time' in 'some cases.' Although Intel claims 'relatively few' customers are affected, it has stopped shipments of these chipsets and started making a revised version of the silicon, which won't be ready until late February. Intel expects to lose $300 million in revenue because of the problem, and it's bracing for repair and replacement costs of $700 million."
Over time? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope to god it's the first one...If not this might beat the floating point error by a mile!
Does anybody else think this sounds ominous? (Score:4, Interesting)
If it were a "due to a design error, setting register xyz to 0xDEADBEEF causes Serious Badness, chipset drivers are being patched to Never Do That on rev.1 chipsets and future chipsets will be amended" that would be unfortunate; but so it goes. Fully deterministic errors, like the classic division bug, may be problematic; in some cases bad enough to qualify the product as just plain defective; but once known they can be mitigated by not stepping on them. Something that "sometimes" "gradually decreases" performance, on a bus with error correction, though, sounds a lot like a physical problem where some sort of silicon/electrical issue causes error rates to increase and thus retries/corrections to increase in frequency, and user-visible performance to go down. That makes me nervous. It sounds less like a deterministic error problem and more like a certain physical components are actually degrading much faster than expected problem...
Can anybody think of an explanation for how a hardware bug would cause behavior that gradually changes over time(in a manner that couldn't be dealt with with a driver update) that doesn't involve the alarming possibility of gradually increasing error rates and/or early death of onboard SATA ports?
Re:Does anybody else think this sounds ominous? (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds less like a deterministic error problem and more like a certain physical components are actually degrading much faster than expected problem...
Well, obviously. Could be a wire that was made too thin, or some component that overheats and slowly damages itself. I'm not sure why you think it's "ominous" though. It's a physical object that apparently has a design defect that causes it to wear out. I've seen ominous things before, but that usually involves a shadowy figure standing in a doorway with something that looks oddly like a machete, but dammit I can't really see clearly in this low light...
Not all chipset affected (Score:2, Interesting)
The systems with the affected support chips have only been shipping since January 9th and the company believes that relatively few consumers are impacted by this issue.
Important details about shipment date lost in transcription.
Re:Intel caught this one first? (Score:2, Interesting)
If its released tomorrow then Apple QA (early adopters) haven't received the new MacBook Pro yet.
DRM? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Slow performance degradation over time" on SATA controllers? Who wants to bet this is due to some "misapplied security" scheme such as DRM or something related to the TPM?
Re:Not all chipset affected (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Intel caught this one first? (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone else linked to a post that claims it only supports ports 2-5 (the 3Gbps ports) not ports 0-1 (the 6Gbps ports). Most systems won't be stressing ports 2-5 that heavilly.
Plus if this is indeed a gradual degredation issue it may be that most people simply haven't been using the systems long enough for it to become noticable yet.