Cougar Point Flaw Debacle Reportedly Costing Intel 1 Billion Dollars as Shares Drop

Without a doubt, one of the least-pleasant surprises the world of IT and technology has been faced with lately was Intel's announcement that it had identified a flaw within its Cougar Point platform for Sandy Bridge CPUs, a massive product recall action ensuing.

Up until now, we've talked not just about Intel's statement, but also about those of its various partners, who were forced to recall all of the products built using the faulty SATA chipset, thus most likely incurring some pretty nasty losses.

However, we've not really tackled the subject of money, which, nevertheless, is quite important, given the fact that this whole mess will certainly cost Intel a buck or two...or 1 billion US dollars, as certain reports suggests.

As some of you might remember, Intel already revealed the fact they had set up a special account for the recall and replacement operations, worth around 700-million US dollars, but it would seem that this won't really be enough.

And that's because losses apparently go far deeper than that, especially since the company's stock also plummeted following this announcement.

Naturally, given the fact that 2010 was Intel's best-year ever, we're quite sure that the chip giant won't be that severely affected by these losses in monetary terms, although things are actually completely different as far as its public image is concerned, this issue casting the unwanted shadow of doubt over the entire Sandy Bridge platform.

I mean, there will be plenty of users who'll think twice before adopting Sandy Bridge, because they'll sort of doubt the platform's reliability (this sort of situation usually affects the consumer psyche in a fairly negative manner).

But, then again, we're pretty sure Intel will manage to get out of this situation, things going back to normal once the recall process is completed and the fixed chipsets start shipping.