You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone - Al Capone
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Intel admits $700 million hit for Sandy Bridge chipset problems
SANDY BRIDGE processors are going to take longer to reach market because Intel has to replace thousands of the faulty Intel 6 series Cougar Point support chips it has shipped.
The chipmaker revealed today that towards the end of this month it will begin to resupply its customers with improved versions of chipsets that use the Cougar Point chip.
The faulty chipsets have been built into products and sold to consumers. A product recall by OEMs is likely, and Intel has said that consumers should work with their retailers to get replacement products.
According to Intel the cost to the company of replacing the faulty chipsets and solving the problem will be at least $700 million. The company expects volume production of the Sandy Bridge chipsets to be back to normal in April, three months after the problem emerged.
The fault causes the Cougar Point chip's ability to talk to SATA devices to degrade over time. Intel claimed that personal data will not be lost, just the chipsets ability to interface with hard drives and DVD players. Chipzilla said that the faulty Cougar Point chip design had passed Intel and original equipment manufacturer testing but the fault had emerged over time.
The Cougar Point chip is a 65nm scale design and Intel stressed that its fab is a mature one that can turnaround production quickly. But that still means the end of February.
The fault is said to have been solved after it was detected this month. Over 100,000 units of the Sandy Bridge chipsets with the faulty Cougar Point support chips have been shipped since the fourth quarter of 2010. µ
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Chipzilla said that the faulty Cougar Point chip design had passed Intel and original equipment manufacturer testing but the fault had emerged over time.
Where is the guard-band?
What intel said was that after shipping 100K units they started to receive some complaints, but they continued production and investigated then found there was indeed an error.
Now anad calculates that 'with 8 million shipped..blah blah', but that would be a bit odd how they went from 100K to 8 million between the start of the reports and the conclusion of the investigation which took not that long, agains according to anand "Based on the timeline it looks like it took them a couple of days to figure it out. Intel then spent a few more days trying to understand the implications of the issue. "
In short it's totally unclear how many chips were shipped.
As for the numbers of failures, intel estimates at least 5% will in 3 years notice an issue, but it could be up to 15% in their estimate, and since it's a failing PLL transistor I expect that when it fails it likely will basically make the error rate so bad that the ports become unusable in half the cases.
Popo hit the nail on the head.
Intel has just found another workaround to all that nonsensical ethical behavior that people try to abide by.
Multiple convictions for anti-competitive and predatory monopolistic behavior? There's a loophole for that.
You know what would have been nice? A 50billion+ dollar(or euro) fine for the 3 decades of their criminal behavior.
I've been Intel-free since 2000, and Nvidia-free since 2003. Yay for ethics.
Nvidia's "bump-gate". Now there's a lesson in how not to sweep stuff under the rug.
Top marks to Intel - they've learned the lesson of FDIV, but after the mess of the i820 chipset, you would think that more care is taken!
$700 mln for 100,000 faulty chipsets - looks like Intel found a new clever way to pay OEMs to use its products.
It's time to buy stock in intel when it hits a low with this development.
muhahahhahhaa.
IF YOU DIVIDE $700,000,000 BY 100,000 PROCESSORS, THAT'S $7,000 PER CPU.
I SUSPECT SOMEBODY IS STEALING A MAJOR AMOUNT OF MONEY FROM INTEL SHAREHOLDERS OVER THIS.
Shame about the fault in the chip, though, it's hardly an issue with a company as mature and reliable as Intel.
I just wish all company's supported their products with such dedication and respect to their customers.
I bet anyone who owns Intel shares are a bit, disappointed, though. At the end of the day, thats the risk you take as a part owner of the company.
I suppose Intel thinks return customer are important to future profits...
After discovering the issue, Intel quickly made it public, fixed the design, and is curretly working on shipping out new replacment parts.
Wish more tech companies were just as forthcoming when these issues surface..cough..cough...AMD...
Remember, the 700 million is more like lost revenue or street price for the parts and not the actual amount it will cost intel.
Pentium's FDIV flaw comes to mind...
"Oh Intel sux let's buy from AMD!"
To Intel, better luck next time boys.
To The Inq, Intel is crying to the (estimated) tune of a cool billion greenbacks.