Apparently there is a flaw in the Sandy Bridge chip that has caused Intel to halt all sales. People who have bought one will need to replace the CPU and Motherboard of their PC. This is a huge disaster for Intel. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20326
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/cougar-point-sandy-bridge-sata-error,12108.html Damn. I came so close to pulling the trigger on Sandy Bridge, and now I'm so glad I didn't. This requires a hardware fix, and some of the Taiwanese manufacturers are such a pain to deal with that I can't imagine this being resolved in a timely fashion or maybe even at all for the people who already bought P67 mobos. This is a pretty big disaster for intel, and it would be the perfect time for AMD to strike with Bulldozer.
Just went to newegg and they've pulled all Sandy Bridge CPUs and motherboards from the website. I've never seen anything like this before. So I guess instead of the success all the early reviews thought it would be, Sandy Bridge will go down as one of the biggest flops in CPU history. So glad I didn't upgrade. It looks like it will be several months before they get things sorted out, which is an eternity in the world of computer hardware. I think I might just drop a Q6600 in my PC to replace my E6600 and see how things pan out with X68 later this year.
Wow, I thought it was just the motherboards. CPU too, they haven't done anything like this since PIII. Although in all fairness they should have recalled early Prescott's, we have quite few at work and when they aren't sounding like a jet taking off because you're viewing an attachment they're frying motherboards due to years of excess heat. EDIT: Yes, it's just an issue with two SATA 3Gb/s ports on motherboards. CPU's have only been pulled from sales because, well, you need one of these motherboards to go with the CPU. Nothing wrong with the CPU's themselves as far as I can tell.
Yeah the initial reports weren't clear. The CPU is fine, the chip set is not. The CPUs will be pulled from the shelves and pre-built PCs and laptop will probably have to be shipped back to the manufactures.
@Fusion Yeah, the early Prescotts were a mess. Anyone who new better went with a Northwood in those days.
Very lucky break for AMD. Just as it was looking like they wouldn't have an answer for Sandy Bridge, Intel shoots themselves in a foot with a crazy design flaw.
If AMD launches Bulldozer in the next few months, and it doesn't suck balls like everything they've released in the last five years, they could have a major victory on their hands.
How crazy would it be if AMD ended up the victor in this round of chips if Intel's actions helped AMD to win more than anything AMD actually did?
I haven't read much about the Bulldozer but I doubt that it will perform on the same level as the Sandy Bridge.
That fact that it's 8 cores makes me wonder if they're adding more cores to make up for the lack of speed.
Probably. Their six core processors aren't even as fast an i5 for instance. They seem to compensate for lack of speed by giving you more cores. I'm not sure what that gets you though. Most of the games out there now don't even take advantage of a quad core.
Their fastest 6 core was doing okay against the original I5. AMD also had the advantage of cheaper motherboards. A good AMD board was about $80while the Intel was around $160. That probably has a lot to do with AMDs backward compatible sockets. Intel has been rather annoying in changing their sockets every 6 months. I think they're up to 4 socket types now for the IX chips. The motherboards are expensive. Now the lack of Sandy Bridge boards on the market will probably drive prices through the roof. Even if the chips are cheap the mobo wont be.
I don't think it will either, but it's likely to at least function without destroying parts of your computer. It doesn't need to match it in terms of performance to be competitive. Intel has a bit of a mess on their hands at the moment. AMD really caught a lucky break.
True about the socket types. We've gone through 1366, 1156, and now 1155 in a little over two years. That's ridiculous. 775 was fine from the late Pentium 4s all the way up to the Core 2 Quad, so clearly socket types don't need to change that frequently. Intel needs to stop being greedy. The constant socket changes are a ploy to sell expensive motherboards rather than letting people keep their existing motherboards and upgrade their CPUs every couple of years.
S775 was FSB based, they've had to change sockets because much more is on the die now than before. Remember how many sockets AMD had for the Athlon 64? Of course once they had S939 everyone was pretty happy for quite some time, until AM2 came along. Of course, people went to C2D by then. AMD Bulldozer uses a different approach. It literally has only one scheduler and one FP unit per two cores, so it won't be like the current Phenom II's where it simply "has more cores". Of course the FP unit is twice the width, and can be split in half to be simultaneously used as if it were two, and the scheduler is designed to be fully utilised thus eliminating the need for technology like Hyper Threading. I think Bulldozer is going to have higher IPC than Phenom II. Maybe not as much as Sandy Bridge, and probably not as much as Ivy Bridge, but enough to be competitive at least; especially having 8 cores.
isn't that what happened last round? AMD only made a profit because of the 700mil intel gave them to settle. I doubt AMD would need it though, this time. the new fusion chip looks like a killer! waiting for my HP dm1z to come in, it's on it's way