Intel has announced that after discussing it with partners that it will restart sales of already made Cougar Point products. Intel doesn’t reveal in detail how these potentially defect circuits will be used, but points out that the circuits can only be used in systems that will not be affected by the decreasing performance of the SATA ports.
Those of you who hasn’t lived under a rockk knows that Intel is in a really bad place now, as it has shipped more than 8 million Cougar Point chipsets with a potential manufacturing error in the SATA 3.0 Gbps controller.
Intel and its partners stopped all sales of the platform and executed a status survey and discussed the results, which has now resulted in parts of the Sandy Bridge assortment returning to sales channels, before the faultfree versions starts selling in late March.
Only computer makers who have committed to shipping the Intel 6 Series Chipset in PC system configurations that are not impacted by the design issue will be receiving these shipments.
At the same time Intel explains that this will not affect the company quarterly report that was updated after the Sandy Bridge recall, which makes us believe that these chipsets will be sold in very low quantities.
Intel says nothing about what systems that have been approved for delivery with the faulty chipsets, but most likely we’re dealing with notebooks and other systems that are unable to use any more than 2 SATA units. which means the two functioning SATA 6.0 Gbps ports will do just fine.
We shouldn’t expect any retail motherboards until April though.
