Intel: What companies are doing to deal with the defective Sandy bridge systems?

Sandy bridge 32nm platform is Intel’s answer to the rising AMD share in the processor market. It was all going well until the Santa Clara based chip giant found out that the support chip in its Sandy bridge architecture, called Intel 6 series (code-named Cougar point), has a design flaw that degrades the SATA port structure over time – hampering hard drive and DVD drive performances.

Although Intel promised an updated chip to replace the faulty ones, there are a number of Sandy bridge units already in the market. This means the companies will have to bear the brunt of supplying faulty systems to the customer. MSI has already stopped production of the faulty systems, Toshiba and Samsung  have promised to issue refunds. Below are some of the measures taken by some other companies, as reported by ZDnet –

·         Gigabyte has stopped production of its 6-series motherboards that come with the P67 and H67 chipsets.

·         Maingear has offered to replace the faulty motherboards, and to compensate the damage, extends the warranty till three years.

·         Digital storm decides to pay both way shipping costs while replacing the motherboards from its systems.

·         Cyberpower does a Digital storm for its gaming notebooks running on Sandy Bridge.

·         Puget system will swap the infected chip and send a PCI-E SATA controller card.

We are sure Intel will have to answer a lot of unhappy OEMs, but there is no doubt that this ugly incidents has can seriously dent Intel’s brand value – and these are not old days when Intel used to have kind of a monopoly over the processor chips.

Source(s)