Apple's next MacBook Pro update was only slightly impacted by Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset flaw, sources said Friday. Some, though not all, of the notebooks were reportedly affected and needed minor logic board changes to prevent the SATA slowdown bug affecting 6 series chipsets. AppleInsider was told the change might only need "less than two weeks."
The Intel Sandy Bridge flaw that is affecting the Cougar Point chipset variants has been pinpointed. A phone call between Intel’s VP and Director of Intel Client PC Operations and Enabling, Steve Smith and Anand Lai Shimpi of Anandtech has revealed that this issue lies with a transistor in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree. The transistor is leaking current, which can cause the 3Gbps SATA ports to lose performance or fail completely. The 6Gbps ports are unaffected by the issue as they have independent clocking trees.
Intel this morning warned of a serious bug with the Cougar Point chipset that would force it to delay desktop PCs using its Sandy Bridge processors. Those using the 6 series have a flaw that gradually degrades the performance of the SATA ports over time, eventually affecting the speed of hard drives and optical drives. The issue was in hardware and needed a reworking at the factory for a fix.
Taiwan's Commercial Times today claimed that Intel will launch its first native USB 3.0 chipset at next week's Intel Developer Forum. Its Cougar Point chipset for desktops using Sandy Bridge processors will get the faster bus speeds and should help accelerate the adoption of the newer standard in computers. When it would ship wasn't mentioned, but Intel has already promised a late 2010 launch and is informally expected to ship in November.
