Intel doesn't wait for fixed 6 Series chips, resumes some shipments

Looks like someone in the Intel office suddenly discovered not selling chipsets also means no money incoming. Oops!

After talking to its partners and most likely crunching serious numbers, Intel has decided that it's fine to resume shipments of 6 Series chipsets that have the design flaw that can lead to degraded performance over the supported SATA 3.0 Gbps ports.

According to Intel, it will only deliver bugged chips to PC makers who will build systems that would not be affected by the issue. This likely means we'll be seeing Sandy Bridge laptops back on sale soon as they can use the two SATA 6.0 Gbps ports unaffected by the bug. Of course, some desktops may qualify for shipping too, if they only have an optical drive and a hard/solid state drive, but their maker will have to tell customers the free SATA 3.0 connectors available are troublesome.

The problematic 6 Series chips have their days numbered though as Intel has already begun manufacturing of bug-free B3 stepping silicon and that will start shipping at the end of this month.