More details emerge about Intel's Cougar Point chipset flaw

More specifics of the problem affecting Intel's 6 Series chipset (codenamed Cougar Point) have emerged courtesy of Anandtech. Speaking with Steve Smith, VP and Director of Intel Client PC Operations and Enabling, the site was able to confirm that the fault affects both P67 and H67 chipsets, pin-pointing the problem to a transistor that's connected to the 3Gbps SATA II ports.

Read the whole story

The real question - what will they do for customers?

I bought an ASRock P67 Extreme4 motherboard and Intel 2600K chip. This thing overclocks to 4.847GHz stable and runs SuperPi 1M in 7.691s. They will only get this rig out of my cold, dead hands. Overclocking depends heavily on the particular motherboard and chip, as well as the positioning and make of the heatsink. I got lucky and everything came together perfectly! First time ever to max out everything!

I have an SSD on SATA port 0 and a fast 1 TB drive on port 1. The seldomly used DVD player is on port 5. E-SATA is on both the OEM SATA ports. Only the DVD may possibly be affected if anything ever goes wrong with the SATA II connector, and nothing may.

So, what are they going to do to replace this board or fix it? I'd be happy if they just sent me a free PCIe SATA controller in case I ever need it and maybe a coupon good towards a future product.

I only have two drives and they are both connected to 3Gbps SATA ports. If I move them to ports 0 and 1 they will still work, right?

I'd be happy with a tube of thermal compound and sending me a replacement board BEFORE I send my one back.... but yes, I'm enjoying my machine, had the last one for almost 4 years. Not looking forward to sitting with everything but the motherboard for weeks :S

Yes they will work perfectly, just note that we still talking about a 5% decrease over a 3 year lifespan and even then u still have to be a super user on hdd workload, so i seriously doubt many ppl will be affected since u prolly replace your current newly pruchased mobo within that limit.

It's not a 5% decrease in performance, but rather an estimated 5% failure rate. In other words, besides the performance issues which you may or may not experience, there is a chance that during normal use some of the 3Gbps ports will stop working altogether over the course of 3 years.

Well, I don't plan on having more than two drives in this computer anyway, so if I do run into issues I will probably just move them to the other ports. If, for whatever reason, I decide to expand, I will probably just purchase a PCIe SATA controller.

This kind of issues, make sense on wait for next geration CPU or Ivy Bridge possible later this year.

I think, it isn't good hurry to buy sonthink with a fail.... Yes, I will wait for the Ivy Bridge on 22 nm.

Tick-tock-tick-crash...

I am so glad that I moved over to AMD, even if their performance is not as great.

Mmmm.... FAIL!

The issue will barely affect any intel users. If they hadn't owned up it probably wouldn't have become a widespread issue in the future.

Still an Intel user. AMD has failed too many times for me in the past. I think it was great that Intel did own up and didn't let it slide.

Has anyone noticed a continued trend of flawed technology products? The iphone 4 had too many to list, the galaxy s has a flawed gps chip and the Bell versions have dying internal SDs. We have the android 2.2 issue where it sends texts to the wrong contact. We have the Notion ink Adam being bricked. Now we have this issue.

Has the worlds standards for quality gone down by so much in the past couple of years?

Gigabyte motherboards have a 3 year warranty.

Hopefully the failure will time itself to the day before the 3 years expire, not the day after.

Ports 0 and 1 are the SATA III ports. Ports 2 thru 5 are the SATA II ports. This should be mentioned in the article, it was on AnandTech. Also the AS Rock manual.

It also looks like Gigabyte is going pro-active in addressing this problem.

I have nothing concrete to base this on, but I will take a shot.

1) I would wager that the in the interest of getting new tech out the door, testing time has shortened, and 'artificial aging' has not been perfected yet.
2) It has been speculated that 11-16 nm is the theoretical limit for transistors as we know them, (and we are getting down there) I have read that every shrink it becomes exponentially more difficult to control gate length.

....Just a theory

1) I agree
2) Will probably become more of a problem with gating in CPU's. The Intel SATA controller transistor fault probably wouldn't factor in here as the controller is built on the 65nm process used for the previous (P55/X58) platforms.

So, if we were to draw a conclusion, should the older P55-X58 platforms succumb to this fault also, or is it specifically inherent to the new chipsets?

Probably not as much as the comsumer's greed for more tech products sooner has gone up.

When you mix the two, it starts to become a "chicken or the egg" paradigm.

So, which came first, more buying, or less testing. I think that's how that would go.

"Artificial Aging", is normally accomplished through accelerated UV exposure, and heating and cooling cycles.

So, it works far better with a product intended for outdoor use, than an indoor product such as computer. You can only overheat a semiconductor so much, or else it fails. So, thermal cycling loses a great deal of its efficacy also. Beyond that, any thing else that might be attempted, causes excursions far beyond normal operating parameters, thus perhaps nullifying many of the results.