Monday brought some bad news for Intel when it was announced that their latest product codenamed “Sandy Bridge” had a flaw in its chipsets.  Sandy Bridge is the code name for Intel’s latest microprocessor or CPU and the chipset called “Cougar Point” is the accompanying set of chips that provider peripheral functionality such as storage, and it’s located on the main board of computer or also known as a “motherboard”.

To be specific, it was portions of Cougar Point’s storage functionality that is potentially vulnerable to premature heat deterioration.  Four out of six storage ports that provide 3 Gbps SATA storage connectivity might deteriorate in speed after a few years of normal usage and Intel reports a 5% failure rate or some slow down of the interface after 3 years.  The good news is that even affected systems aren’t in danger of contaminated storage data because SATA error correction will address the problem, and it would only result in minor slow downs due to error correction retransmission which may not even be noticeable to most storage devices.  The remaining two 6 Gbps SATA storage ports are completely unaffected which means many laptops might be spared this ordeal entirely since they typically only have two SATA ports.  Anandtech has more of the gory details and they pointed out that this is not going to require a full recall.

By Tuesday, it appears that all of the Cougar Point based motherboards had disappeared from online retailers and will likely remain unavailable for the next month or two until they have unaffected chipsets.  That probably involves swapping the small Cougar Point chipset or possibly replacing the entire motherboard.  This will affect the desktop market which is smaller than the largely unaffected notebook market.  Only the notebooks with external SATA storage ports will be affected by this issue.  Newer Apple notebooks that will be based on Sandy Bridge are probably unaffected since they only use the 6 Gbps SATA ports.

Looking at Intel stock charts below from Monday, news of the chipset flaw depressed Intel stock by a little more than 1% through most of the day but recovered completely by day close.  The market’s response is not surprising considering the unlikely hood of Intel losing anything close to the worst case estimate of -$1 billion in adjusted earnings.

[Cross-Posted at Digital Society]