Just a couple of weeks after the official recall of all Sandy Bridge chipsets with the, now quite famous, SATA 3.0Gbps port bug, Intel has now announced and decided that some motherboards will after all be available, at least for system integrators.
As far as Intel is concerned, the motherboards will be available to PC makers aka. system integrators. It makes sense as the two SATA 6.0Gbps ports are unaffected by the issue and it will be quite simple to put together a desktop system, at least if it only has one optical drive and a hard/solid state drive. Of course, those systems integrators will have to clearly state to customers that SATA 3.0Gbps ports are unavailable.
Of course, this doesn't come as a surprise considering that some retail/e-tail shops have already struck an agreement with various motherboard makers to keep selling the Sandy Bridge motherboards until the new, replacement boards, become available.
According to Intel, the new 6-series chipset is already in production and Intel claims that it should start shipping those at the end of this month. Of course, this timeframe sounds a bit off as even if Intel has the chip in-house it still has to test it and we are pretty sure that first batch of these will ship directly to OEMs while channel might get it in April, and we are talking about the best case scenario.
Tuesday, 08 February 2011 15:36
System integrators to resume Sandy Bridge sales
Written by Slobodan Simic
Sandy Bridge here to stay
Published in
Motherboard
Tagged under
Latest from Slobodan Simic