“Intel announced on January 31 that it had stopped shipments of the ‘Cougar Point’ chipset that accompanies its second-generation Intel Core (‘Sandy Bridge’) processor owing to a flaw that can affect access to a hard-disk drive, optical drive, or other device that connects to a computer using SATA technology,” Brooke Crothers reports for CNET.
“Apple does not have any Sandy Bridge-based systems, nor has it announced any,” Crothers reports. “But there have been fairly cogent arguments made and rumors floated that a Sandy Bridge MacBook refresh would hit soon. So, the question is, how far does this push out a highly probable future rollout of Sandy Bridge-based models? If Apple was planning a February or March refresh, then there are obvious delays. If the rollout was planned for late spring or early summer, then the delay would probably be minimal.”
Crothers reports, “This schedule would also apply to Apple’s iMac, for example, which currently uses last-generation Core i3 and Core i5 chips.”
Read more in the full article here.
Although I agree in substance, a slight correction: There is no SATA 6.0 yet – the 6GB/s version of SATA is actually SATA 3.0, the older 3GB/s version which is defective in the current chips is SATA 2.0.
Serial ATA – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia