

Intel recalling Sandy Bridge processors - usaar333
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4142/intel-discovers-bug-in-6series-chipset-begins-recall

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wtallis
It's about time for the people running Intel's chipset division to start
losing their jobs. Since they greedily kicked NVidia out of the chipset
business, they've done a great job of proving how bad a decision that was for
consumers:

Intel's integrated graphics performance is still pathetic, though it has at
least gotten up to the lowest level of performance that AMD and NVidia have
been willing to put on the market. This has been a real sore point for anybody
trying to make a good low-power notebook (ie. Apple).

Intel's chipsets have been slow to pick up new features, with this latest
generation being the first to offer 6Gbps SATA (which is necessary to get full
performance out of last year's high-end SSDs), albeit only two ports at that
speed, and they won't be adding USB3 support until their next micro-
architecture revision, which is at least a year away.

To top it off, the latest generation of chipsets exhibit one of the most
disgusting segmentation strategies Intel has ever tried: the Sandy Bridge CPUs
have on-die graphics chips that are an unavoidable cost for consumers, and
their performance is insufficient for even casual gaming. Their redeeming
quality is the top-notch transcoding engine, which offers higher performance
than any CPU or discrete GPU can manage. However, in order to use it, you have
to use the integrated graphics. There's a software hack that will let you use
it with discrete GPUs, but only on the multimedia-oriented H67 chipset. The
performance-oriented P67 chipset (which is the only one to support multiple
discrete graphics cards or overclocking) completely disables the integrated
graphics. If you want to build a gaming system, Intel forces you to pay for a
couple hundred million extra transistors on your CPU that you won't be allowed
to use.

After all that, it's hard to feel sorry for Intel's biggest CPU architecture
launch ever being ruined like this. If they still had a third-party chipset
partner, then they would at least be able to sell _some_ Sandy Bridge
processors in February.

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usaar333
On the bright side, this only affects users with more than 2 SATA devices.

For those of us who only have 2, is there a way to get recalled chips on the
cheap?

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wmf
The headline is wrong; they're not recalling the processors.

