Well that was fast! Less than two weeks after Intel revealed that it had discovered a flaw in its 6-series controller chips, the company has announced (PDF) that it would be shipping revised versions to partners next week.
The new B3 stepping chips were originally meant to arrive with OEMs at the end of this month, but they'll now be shipping out on February 14. As well as a minor change to the silicon that will prevent the SATA performance from degrading, there'll be an updated BIOS to accommodate the new design.
Otherwise, the hardware is largely the same, and Intel is advising partners that there won't be much need for revalidation of old products using the new controller.
The news applies to all of the 6-series chipsets, including the familiar P67 and H67 desktop controller hubs and their mobile variants.
So what does this mean for consumers? Since Intel is fast-tracking the deployment of the new chips, we should see updated motherboards and notebooks slightly sooner than anticipated. Mass production was expected to ramp up at some point in the next six week with wide retail availability scheduled for mid-April. This announcement could mean that we could see B3 controllers in shops as soon as the end of March.
Obviously this will be great news for OEMs, vendors and manufacturers whose bottom line is bound to have been hit by the recall. It'll also be warmly received by the likes of NVIDIA and AMD - at least in the graphics division - that are thought to be suffering from a dip in sales of discrete notebook and desktop GPUs as a result of Intel's problems.
