The dust has started to settle after it was announced that Intel had found a flaw in its latest 6-series chipsets, and now retailers are starting to work out how to handle the problem.
Clear the shelves
NewEgg - one of the biggest component retailers in the US - has pulled all affected motherboards from the virtual shelves, as well as all Sandy Bridge CPUs. From the looks of things, laptops using the new processors have been removed as well. P67-based boards have also been delisted at NCIX, although CPUs and notebooks are still available.
On this side of the pond, eBuyer has followed suit by removing the listings for LGA 1155 motherboards. There are still references to Sandy Bridge CPUs on some pages, and while they can be added to the shopping basked, the product pages have been removed.
Keep calm and carry on
Scan is taking a slightly different tack, by posting a prominent advisory notice on the main page, but letting customers continue to buy motherboards, CPUs, laptops and desktops at their own risk. The company's official line is that, "we see this as a short-term issue, and over the next few days we expect that a swapout procedure will be highlighted, until such times, please continue using your systems as normal".
Unfortunately, this information isn't repeated on the product or category pages, so it might be easy for unsuspecting customers to miss.
At other retailers, including Dabs, Microdirect and Amazon UK, it seems to be business as normal with a full range of Sandy Bridge products still listed - at least for the time being.
Knock on effect
The actual problem lies in the design of the SATA controller in Intel's recently launched 6-series chipsets and affects desktop and notebook systems, potentially causing performance degradation over time. The issue is exacerbated by heat or increased voltage, and though it applies equally to desktops and notebooks, only ports 2-5 suffer the flaw. Since some notebooks only use ports 0 and 1, they'll never encounter this problem. A detailed - but fairly easy to understand - look at the error has already been posted on Anandtech, for those interested in a bit more detail.
For the time being, anyone with a Sandy Bridge based system would probably be advised to stick to using ports 0 and 1, or a third party SATA controller if there is one. The next step would be to follow up with either the retailer or motherboard/system manufacturer to find out how they'll be dealing with replacements and repairs.
The full impact of this design error isn't clear at this point, although there's already speculation that it could cause a serious dip in the PC market, as well as delaying some major new products. Among these are the new MacBook Pros, which were expected to be announced sometime in the next few months sporting Intel's latest silicon.
