14 DAY TRIAL // Those customers that were worried about having acquired one of the newest Intel Cougar point-based motherboards may finally be able to calm down now that Intel has finished negotiating with its motherboard partners.
As end-users will no doubt know by now, Intel recently became the victim of its own mistakes when it discovered a rather nasty flaw in its 6-Series Cougar point chipset.
Apparently, the chipset had a problem that led to degradation of SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, and this prompted pretty much every motherboard and notebook maker out there to halt sales, even recall shipped products.
Since Intel will have to bear most of the financial brunt, it was previously said that the Santa Clara, California-based company would have to part with about 1 billion US dollars.
The fact that sales of motherboard featuring the repaired chipset will only start around April is already proving to be quite financially painful to everyone involved.
AMD does seem to be getting more orders, of course, since the vacuum needs to be filled somehow, but its graphics cards business, as well as NVIDIA's, are suffering because of how sales of notebooks with discrete graphics have stopped.
Now, Digitimes reports that the chip giant has finished negotiating with its partners and has agreed to give full refunds for all affected boards.
This will definitely reduce the financial impact on the revenues of ASUS, Gigabyte, ECS, MSI, Acer, Tochiba, Lenovo and ASRock, among others, who have already recalled defective devices.
The report does not say for certain whether the related losses will even be recognized in Intel's financial report.
Meanwhile, the first fixed chipsets have already started to be sent out to OEMs, meaning that the mainboard makers above should be able to start work on new platforms.
The bright side to all this is that the delayed demand will most likely lead to stronger than usual financial results for the second quarter of 2011.