When compared to Egypt’s situation, having recall some processors is no big deal, but that doesn’t mean we should take news of Intel warning us about a serious bug in their latest Cougar Point chipset lightly. As part of the recently introduced Sandy Bridge chipsets, Intel realized that some folks using the 6 series do suffer from a flaw that gradually degrades the performance of the SATA ports over time, which will also affect the hard drive and optical drive speeds over time. Since this is a hardware issue, it will definitely need a recall for the factory to fix it. According to Intel, the flaw is currently limited to quad Core i5 and i7 chips, and since notebooks rely on the Huron River platform, those should not be affected in any way. This development has delayed plenty of desktop computers by a month, since shipments of the patched chipset will arrive later next month and will only enter full speed when April rolls around. This will hit Intel’s pockets by at least $700 million in lost production and parts replacement, but that shouldn’t sink the semiconductor giant anytime soon.
Update: The title has been amended, with all instances of “processor” being changed to “chipset”. I apologize for any confusion caused.
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