14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that the industry is doing its best to recover from Intel's misstep with the 6-Series Cougar Point chipset, as new motherboards have started to be listed, albeit not set to sell for weeks to come.
End-users keeping track of the happenings on the IT market will be aware of the fact that, some time ago, Intel discovered a rather serious design flaw with its 6-Series chipsets.
Meant to pair up with Sandy Bridge processors, the chipsets supposedly had an issue that led to the degradation of the SATA 3.0 Gbps ports.
All in all, the functionality of mainboards and notebooks based on it was threatened or affected, so all OEMs stopped shipping them.
This left a vacuum that, understandably, the Santa Clara, California-based company is trying to fill in as soon as possible.
To that end, not long ago, the outfit managed to start shipping the fixed, B3-stepping core logic sets, though the first unaffected notebooks aren't expected to show up until March.
Now, a more recent report has brought to the attention of the user base the fact that, apparently, motherboards have started showing up online as well.
Many of their makers have added the “B3” or “Rev.3” moniker at the end of the product name, so as to let customers easily distinguish them from the rest. Either way, it will still take a few weeks for deliveries to commence.
Unfortunately, desktop platforms will start selling even later than the first notebooks, in April to be more precise.
In the meantime, it would seem that some retailers are still selling affected motherboards from ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and even Intel, or so the report states.
Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices is, understandably, dealing with increased demand for its own hardware (Brazos in particular) and has placed bigger orders with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).