Intel Recalls Sandy Bridge Chipsets Due to Faults

Intel has issued a press release stating that they will be recalling "Cougar Point" (That's the codename for 6-series chipsets, as found on Sandy Bridge motherboards) chips due to an issue with the onboard SATA controller, it appears that it "degrades over time" causing poor I/O performance in the longer term.

Those of you with H67/P67 'boards need not worry - it's perfectly safe to go about your day to day computing - just be on the look out for recall notices.

Intel are expecting a $300m hit to their revenue for the first quarter as a result.

Fixed chipsets should roll out in April, giving AMD ample time to launch it's own Bulldozer line of CPU's and enjoy some domination.

This is all vaguely reminscent of Intel's problems way back in 2004, with the 915 and 925 chips' PCI-e controllers.

AMD Radeon 6990 - The Dual GPU, 4GB GDDR5 Pixel-Punching Beast

The Dual GPU, 4GB GDDR5 Pixel-Punching Beast is pretty much the official name. I think.

The reference card (pictured above by 4Gamer.net) has been shown off by AMD (ATI) at the Asia Pacific tech event. The 6990 4GB will fill the slot of 6xxx answer to AMD's older dual-GPU card; the 5970 2GB.

It will likely be based on the 6970's GPU, of the Cayman architecture, giving it a total of 3,072 stream processors. It could, however have slightly less and be based on the 6950 - a move I don't think AMD would pull unless they intend to have two dual-GPU cards occupying the top spot (perhaps a dual-6950 based 6980?).

Round back, we can see four mini DisplayPort outputs, along with a single DVI slot. That's no Eyefinity 6 - but then MSI, Asus, Evga, XFX etc. love to handle that themselves. Of course, some crazy folk will chain a couple of these bad-enough-as-it-is boys up in CrossFireX.

Here's awaiting more info.

Nvidia launches GTX 560 Ti

You know what day it is today?

Yup, that's right, 25th Jan - scheduled launch date for the 5xx series update to Nvidia's fantastic GTX 460.

Well it's happened. The GTX 560 Ti is here. The 460 was a very capable GPU (still is), very overclockable, and getting inredibly cheap now too.

So can the 560 live up to the hype? Read on to find out.

Nvidia entering desktop CPU market

At CES this year, nVidia announced their "Project Denver" plans to move in to the desktop and server CPU business.

They already have the Tegra line of mobile device CPU/GPUs - but in this latest stunt, nVidia will be launching Cortex-A15 based CPUs for the desktop market, with their ARM license.


This plays nicely in time with Microsoft's CES announcement to extend Windows compatibility into ARM architectures.


The A15 will be combined with a GeForce GPU to directly take on Intel's GMA enabled processors (H series chipsets), and AMD's "APU".

AMD Fusion embedded x86 platform

Nifty stuff, it has to be said. AMD have announced their forthcoming "G-Series" embedded platform, with a Fusion APU (Bobcat single or dual core CPU of up to 1.6GHz, with integrated GPU - but we can't call them that any more - this is, of course, an 'Accelerated Processing Unit') at heart, supporting DX11 and housing 2 DIMMs of your finest 1066 DDR3 RAM.

This will hardly be an upgrade for your current PC, and should you care to ask "But will it play Crysis?" semi-ironically, you would not get an answer in the affirmative.

Notching it down to SFF (Small Form Factor) PC's, in-car boxes, and STBs (Set Top Boxes) - well, this could be a winner.

Full press release, and videos after the break.