MSI gets its hands on working Sandy Bridge chipsets

MOTHERBOARD MAKER Micro Star International (MSI) has announced that it will be shipping the B3 stepping of Intel's P67/H67 Cougar Point chipset.

MSI like most mainboard manufacturers was caught up in Intel's Cougar Point chip recall last month. The Cougar Point chip is used in Intel's latest Sandy Bridge chipsets, and after performing stress testing Intel found that SATA performance degraded over time. A recall followed, with Intel saying that it would resume P67/H67 chipset fabrication in March, though MSI claims that it has managed to get hold of B3 stepping Cougar Point chips that do not exhibit the SATA degradation.

To help its customers identify MSI boards with the latest Cougar Point chipset, MSI has stuck a label with the words "MSI B3 Stepping Ready" on its boxes. It says this should allow its customers to confidently buy its latest motherboards.

It has been a busy few weeks for Intel following the Cougar Point recall. Intel CEO Paul Otellini publicly expressed his shock at Nokia's decision to dump Meego, the Linux based operating system Intel was co-developing with Nokia. Then on Friday the chipmaker announced it would be building a new multi-billion dollar chip plant.

During a visit by US President Barak Obama to Intel's R&D labs in Hillsboro Oregon, the firm announced that it will be ploughing $5 billion into building Fab 42 in Arizona. Intel claims that Fab 42 will be the most advanced chip plant in the world and will be tooled up to produce 300mm wafers at the 14nm process node.

Intel's Fab 42 is scheduled to come online in 2013, which incidentally is when the next major 'tick' will happen in the firm's cyclical tick-tock processor development and fabrication strategy. µ