Intel Cougar Point Recall, Burns Early Adopters

Intel announced January 31 a design flaw in the P67 and H67 Cougar Point chipsets for its Sandy Bridge platform. In its press release Intel disclosed, "As part of ongoing quality assurance, Intel Corporation has discovered a design issue in a recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, code-named Cougar Point, and has implemented a silicon fix. In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives... Intel has stopped shipment of the affected support chip from its factories. Intel has corrected the design issue, and has begun manufacturing a new version of the support chip which will resolve the issue."

In the wake of the announcement, several manufacturers have either announced recalls or promised fixes in the next few months. Dell was one of the first to post an update in it's blog Direct2Dell, "Customers experiencing issues will be supported under the warranty and service terms. Once we have new chipsets from Intel in early April, we will provide a motherboard replacement that corrects the design issue at no cost to our customers. Replacements will be provided at the customers’ location and convenience via authorized Dell service providers. Affected customers may also take advantage of the applicable return policy, which may vary by region."

Lenovo also took it's turn to assure it's customer that, "Following Intel's announcement confirming a design issue in their recently released support chip, the Intel 6 Series, Lenovo will be putting in place a special service program that will enable customers who purchased affected PCs to receive a system board replacement free-of-charge, as soon as those parts become available."

MSI made public a somewhat similar announcement for it's products, assuring it's customers that, "MSI takes the quality of our products very serious, so at this moment we are investigating product batches that may be affected and, meanwhile, have stopped all shipments to our distributors and resellers."

HP, Acer, Toshiba and Samsung have reportedly made announcements about recalls and release delays for their own products.  The recall is supposed to cost Intel $300 million in lost revenue and $700 million in repairs and replacements.

If there ever was a perfect time not to be an early adopter, this would be one of them. I count myself as one conservative upgrader. This time around, that actually worked to my advantage. And I'm thinking it's about time everyone give AMD a second and well-deserved look.