Intel halts Sandy Bridge sales

Intel - one of the biggest chip manufacturers has halted the shipment of hardware incorporating their newest line of processors - Sandy Bridge.

The manufacturer is recalling current version of the processors at a cost of around $1bn (£600m) due to a fault in the underlying architecture of the processor.
Cougar Point - the connection used to combine both graphics and processing to the single chip was found to be flawed which would lead to problems connecting to DVD and Hard drives.

Currently 500 models of PC are under development which will all be halted while the new version of the chip is in development.
Current releases of motherboards and CPU's will need to be withdraw the the CPU will have to be re-designed to deal with the flaw.

The fault will cause a huge global underlying halt to the development of new PC models which could take up to and over 3 months.

Intel's competitor - AMD found a bonus jump of 5% in their share prices as it is seen their rival chip - Fusion - could be called into early release/development with further contractors possibly opening the door for them to take a share of Intel's profits and share.

Top-end processors, the second-generation Core i5 and Core i7 - sold around the 9th of January are likely to be affected - around 8 million chips.
Although the failures would occur over a 3 year period the replacement program is being rolled out.

Original article found in - The Guardian.

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