Intel Begins Shipping Bugged Sandy Bridge Chipsets

It’s been merely a week since Intel announced a fault found within its H67/P67 chipsets, but given the amount of chatter around the Web in that time, it almost feels like it’s been a lot longer. Although consumers are still stuck in a bit of a rough spot, or more of a waiting game, Intel is busily pounding out revised chips that should be shipping to vendors soon.

In an update sent out on Monday, Intel announced that it was continuing to send some vendors the knowingly faulty chips, due to the continued demand. This seems like an odd move to make, but the reason Intel agreed to it, or is confident in doing it at all, is that it’s setting out guidelines of how the chipsets can be used. Essentially, the configurations need to be designed in such a way that the SATA-related flaw will never be exposed.

This means that the designs would essentially not be able to allow future-expandability, although the press release doesn’t explicitly state this. But, if a design is to prevent such a flaw from being exposed, it does need to be a rather specific design. Fortunately for notebook vendors, this issue is a lot easier to work around.

If you’re going to be buying a Sandy Bridge PC from a major vendor, you should be able to assume that it’s well-designed and you should never experience an issue. For those who are planning to build their own PC, or buy from a boutique, the issue is still going to exist until Intel can roll out its revised chipsets to all of the different vendors.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 7, 2011 – On January 31, 2011, Intel disclosed a design issue with a support chip, the Intel® 6 Series Chipset that has the potential to impact certain PC system configurations. Intel subsequently initiated extensive discussions with computer makers about this topic. Both Intel and its customers are focused on delivering the highest quality PC systems based on Intel® 2nd Generation Core® Processors. As a result of these discussions and specific requests from computer makers, Intel is resuming shipments of the Intel® 6 Series Chipset for use only in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue.