14 DAY TRIAL // All we've heard about the Haswell collection of CPUs from Intel, the so-called fourth generation of CPUs, has been positive, for the most part, but not all is rosy in paradise it seems.
Haswell has an integrated USB 3.0 host controller, which means that all PCs based on it will have support for such ports.
Unfortunately, a problem has been discovered, one that may or may not lead to the delay of the platform.
Since Intel isn't about to let anything stand in its way, we assume it will do all it can to overcome this problem in short order.
Incentive is definitely not in short supply at least. No one wants a PC that will freeze when playing music or running applications from a USB 3.0 device. Sadly, this is precisely the sort of risk that Haswell is running.
PCs tend to go into sleep mode when no input is received for a while. It is a way to cut on power draw by shutting down the monitor and some of the internal PC hardware parts.
Microsoft's Windows operating system can go into standby or sleep (ACPI mode S3) even while a music playback application, for example, is still on.
The data freezing problem that Hardware.info reported on can happen when waking from S3 sleep mode while music, videos or documents stored on a USB 3.0 device are open.
A PDF document would, for instance, come up blank, music would stop or jar, videos would stutter and, again, freeze.
No data is lost, and it should be an easy enough matter to restart the application and/or re-access the drive.
Unfortunately, it can become quite irritating, and if one were to be working on a document only to have to leave the PC and return later, data may be lost since the connection to the USB device will be cut off. Fortunately, most people know better than to edit such files directly on removable media.
Last we heard, Haswell was still on track for a mid-2013 launch. Probably during Computex 2013 (Taipei, Taiwan, in June).