Intel finds flaw in 6-series chipsets, halts shipments
Oops... this probably isn't the kind of news that early adopters of "Sandy Bridge"-based systems want to hear.
As phenomenal as Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors turned out to be, nothing in this world is truly perfect. Intel announced earlier this morning that it has discovered a flaw in the 6-series chipsets that accompany the new processor family. While it reassures users that they can "continue to use their systems with confidence," the chipmaker has nonetheless halted chipset shipments until a new, bug-free version of the silicon starts to ship out late next month.
What's the problem? Intel explains, "In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives."
The Tech Report has the story, while Anandtech has more on the specifics of the issue.What's the problem? Intel explains, "In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives."
If you have a desktop system with six SATA ports driven off of P67/H67 chipset, there’s a chance (at least 5%) that during normal use some of the 3Gbps ports will stop working over the course of 3 years. The longer you use the ports, the higher that percentage will be. If you fall into this category, chances are your motherboard manufacturer will set up some sort of an exchange where you get a fixed board. The motherboard manufacturer could simply desolder your 6-series chipset and replace it with a newer stepping if it wanted to be frugal.
If you have a notebook system with only two SATA ports however, the scenario is a little less clear. Notebooks don’t have tons of storage bays and thus they don’t always use all of the ports a chipset offers. If a notebook design only uses ports 0 & 1 off the chipset (the unaffected ports), then the end user would never encounter an issue and the notebook may not even be recalled. In fact, if there are notebook designs currently in the pipeline that only use ports 0 & 1 they may not be delayed by today’s announcement. This is the only source of hope if you’re looking for an unaffected release schedule for your dual-core SNB notebook.
View or post comments.If you have a notebook system with only two SATA ports however, the scenario is a little less clear. Notebooks don’t have tons of storage bays and thus they don’t always use all of the ports a chipset offers. If a notebook design only uses ports 0 & 1 off the chipset (the unaffected ports), then the end user would never encounter an issue and the notebook may not even be recalled. In fact, if there are notebook designs currently in the pipeline that only use ports 0 & 1 they may not be delayed by today’s announcement. This is the only source of hope if you’re looking for an unaffected release schedule for your dual-core SNB notebook.
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Intel 'Emcrest' SSDs to launch next month?
While Sandforce's SSD controllers rule the roost in performance terms right now, it was inevitable that Intel would soon strike back with something new of their own to try and snatch their crown. That attempt looks set to appear under the company's "Emcrest" codename, although sadly these drives won't feature the 25nm memory chips we've been looking forward to for what seems like an age now.
The rumour mill has been pretty quiet on Intel's third-gen SSDs since we caught wind of some supposed specs in October last year. Although the drives are still due out this quarter, the latest buzz suggests that they might actually be something to get excited about.
According to Fudzilla's network of unnamed sources, the next-gen SSDs will be a part of the Emcrest-family and built using Intel's brand new 34nm NAND. Although this is a step backwards from the 25nm memory that was rumoured previously, it does seem a little bit more realistic.
But it's the performance numbers that are really interesting. The source suggests that read speeds could be on the order of 450MB/s, while writes would be able to hit 300MB/s. For comparison, Intel's current generation drives - even the high performance X25-E series - only managed to hit 250MB/s and 170MB/s. Random read performance is suspected to be around 20,000 4k IOPS.
HEXUS has the full story.According to Fudzilla's network of unnamed sources, the next-gen SSDs will be a part of the Emcrest-family and built using Intel's brand new 34nm NAND. Although this is a step backwards from the 25nm memory that was rumoured previously, it does seem a little bit more realistic.
But it's the performance numbers that are really interesting. The source suggests that read speeds could be on the order of 450MB/s, while writes would be able to hit 300MB/s. For comparison, Intel's current generation drives - even the high performance X25-E series - only managed to hit 250MB/s and 170MB/s. Random read performance is suspected to be around 20,000 4k IOPS.
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