Paging major Major Major.
Even if I hadn't been interested in the QA or lack-there-of, I would still have read to the end to find out how the Smith's turned out.
How much did a little design flaw in one metal layer on the Cougar Point Intel 6 chipset used with Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 chips cost Intel? A cool $1bn, that's how much. And in a conference call with Wall Street analysts on Monday, Intel's two Smiths – Stacey Smith, Intel's chief financial officer, and Steve Smith, …
FTA: This Cougar Point SATA I/O flaw does not seem to be as serious as Intel's infamous June 1994 floating-point math flaw, discovered in its Pentium 5 and not confirmed to customers until five months later after news of the bug broke in the press. That bug caused Intel a PR nightmare and a $500m charge.
I remember the bug ... but I don't remember me no Pentium 5. Man that caused heartache for us (I was working at a Uni supporting people doing mathematical modelling - we were directly affected). But it was a Pentium (meaning 5th) which followed the 286, 386 and 486 chips. It would have been the 586 but Intel had been told they couldn't protect the numbers as names, and thus we had had the AMD 386, 486 etc. directly competing with the Intel parts.
And Intel just couldn't take it :)
You know, when a goodly chunk of the world isn't even using 1.5Gb/s SATA yet, already calling the not-quite-bleeding-edge-latest SATA implementation "legacy" shows typical marketeering arrogance. Now, we've known for years that marketeering does stupid things like that, but that's no reason to blindly copy the press release-ese. The problem isn't in the technology --after all, next week there'll be a newer, faster version of the same old anyway-- but the part that irks is the senseless cheapening of the term "legacy". Just like if someone says "guaranteed" you have to ask "that's nice, but what is it that guarantee of yours really worth?", "legacy" really is not a valid synonym for "you're not dancing on the bleeding edge, you total doofus".
Yes, this is pedantic. Even so. I'm not reading this rag because I like press releases and their word salad verbiage so much. El Reg hacks, do take note.
For crissake, if there is a flaw in MY Cougar Point chip, I would like to find out about it!!!!
Did Intel issue or will Intel issue a diagnostic that identifies the flawed chips? Given that Intel is so rigorous about steppings, sSpecs and other identifying information, the least they could do is enable us to check all our computers for the presence of defective chips, without doing a complete teardown of a system, of course!!!!!
... Ben