(Bio)Degradable Chips

That shiny dual-Opteron motherboard still hasn't shown itself in Australia, so in the meantime I was looking into the new Sandy Bridge systems from Intel.  They're not a huge technical advance over last year's models, but they're a good bit cheaper if you want a fast quad-core system, and they support DDR3 RAM - which my current systems don't, and which has gone since I built my current systems from being somewhat overpriced to cheap as dirt, around $100 for 8GB.

I wasn't going to buy a new system until I knew I'd have time to set it up, though - I've done that before and had parts still sitting in their packaging six months later.  So I priced up some configs and waited for the right moment -

And then a shark came along and ate them all.

The exact nature of the problem with the Sandy Bridge chipsets isn't clear - it's some sort of bit rot in the SATA controller* - but it's sufficiently serious that Intel has recalled all of the chipsets - every single desktop motherboard made for the new CPUs is going to be scrapped and replaced.  I was wondering when notebooks were going to show up with the new chips, and there's my answer - it would seem the notebook chipsets have the same bug.

The server version of the new chips was scheduled to launch on February 20th, but I'm guessing that this will either be pushed back or turned into a paper launch.  Though it's possible that the server chipsets are based on a different design and don't have the same flaw; I don't know, and since the product hasn't been officially announced yet, Intel aren't saying anything.

Intel are saying that the recall will cost them $1 billion - but that's just the direct costs in engineering, manufacturing, and repair and replacement of existing boards.  They also have to deal with the fact that sales of their mainstream product family have been stopped dead for at least a month, and that uptake after that will probably be noticeably slower than before.

On the upside, it puts my own occasional technical failings into a very comforting perspective.

* Actually, AnandTech seems to have all the details:

The problem in the chipset was traced back to a transistor in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree. The aforementioned transistor has a very thin gate oxide, which allows you to turn it on with a very low voltage. Unfortunately in this case Intel biased the transistor with too high of a voltage, resulting in higher than expected leakage current. Depending on the physical characteristics of the transistor the leakage current here can increase over time which can ultimately result in this failure on the 3Gbps ports. The fact that the 3Gbps and 6Gbps circuits have their own independent clocking trees is what ensures that this problem is limited to only ports 2 - 5 off the controller.

They're probably the best PC tech site around; I should have gone there first.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:53 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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