Intel resumes shipping flawed Sandy Bridge chipsets
Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset headache took another turn today. Last week Intel announced that it was pulling all Cougar Point chipsets that support its new Sandy Bridge desktop and laptop CPU family due to a flaw in the chip controlling the Serial ATA II data inputs.
Citing high demand from its desktop- and laptop-selling customers, Intel announced today that while it works on re-manufacturing the chipset, it would resume shipping the older flawed version, and pledged to work with system vendors to either eliminate or minimize customer exposure to the potential problem.
The flaw, said to affect 5 to 15 percent of all Cougar Point motherboards, results in a performance degradation to storage devices connected to the motherboards' Serial ATA II data inputs. Devices that use those inputs are typically either hard drives or optical disk drives. If the inputs were affected, connected drives would eventually slow down to the point of becoming unusable.
