Intel is setting aside money to fix a hardware issue with its Atom C2000 SoCs [System on Chips], which are used in products such as servers, routers, and network attached storage:
Last week, Paul Alcorn over at Tom's Hardware picked up on an interesting statement made by Intel in their Q4 2016 earnings call. The company, whose Data Center group's profits had slipped a bit year-over-year, was "observing a product quality issue in the fourth quarter with slightly higher expected failure rates under certain use and time constraints." As a result the company had setup a reserve fund as part of their larger effort to deal with the issue, which would include a "minor" design (i.e. silicon) fix to permanently resolve the problem.
[...] Jumping a week into the present, since their earnings call Intel has posted an updated spec sheet for the Atom C2000 family. More importantly, device manufacturers have started posting new product errata notices; and while they are keeping their distance away from naming the C2000 directly, all signs point to the affected products being C2000 based. As a result we finally have some insight into what the issue is with C2000. And while the news isn't anywhere close to dire, it's certainly not good news for Intel. As it turns out, there's a degradation issue with at least some (if not all) parts in the Atom C2000 family, which over time can cause chips to fail only a few years into their lifetimes.
[...] Finally, what's likely to be the most affected on the consumer side of matters will be on the Network Attached Storage front. [...] Seagate, Synology, ASRock, Advantronix, and other NAS vendors have all shipped devices using the flawed chips, and as a result all of these products are vulnerable to early failures. These vendors are still working on their respective support programs, but for covered devices the result is going to be the same: the affected NASes will need to be swapped for models with fixed boards/silicon. So NAS owners will want to pay close attention here, as while these devices aren't necessarily at risk of immediate failure, they are at risk of failure in the long term.
Intel has published an updated spec sheet (pdf).
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @04:02PM
Amirite?
Hardware developers have to produce perfection, while it's perfectly acceptable for a 19-year-old "Wunderkind" intern to dump pile of crap on millions of people.
You know what, though? Intel has provided a fix for systems manufacturers to follow, and the broken equipment will be undoubtedly replaced—that's a far more difficult cleanup task, and a far more effective solution, than anything that you software ninnies do.
(Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Friday February 10 2017, @04:14PM
That's why they call it hardware.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @04:17PM
There. That's more descriptive.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @04:21PM
And that's exactly why hardware manufacturers are expected to more carefully design and test their products: Replacing them is so much more complicated and expensive.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @04:25PM
If software is easier to fix, then it should be even more perfect!
Not only do software bugs languish, but new bugs are gladly built atop the old!
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday February 10 2017, @06:19PM
Are you suggesting that is the software engineer's decision?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday February 10 2017, @07:07PM
Once the fix exists, it is easier to apply.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Friday February 10 2017, @05:28PM
> Intel has provided a fix for systems manufacturers to follow, and the broken equipment will be undoubtedly replaced—that's a far more
> difficult cleanup task, and a far more effective solution, than anything that you software ninnies do.
Yup. We have to wait for Intel to provide the chips, and we're nowhere near the top of the list.
In the meantime, we need a PCB spin before we ship any more product with the current parts.
Then we need to get extra PCBs to put those new chips on, or take the risk to rework existing ones.
Then we need to get the customers to ship their boxes for the swap to happen.
The failure numbers are not horrible for consumer products, and I suspect many manufacturers may just ignore their current deployed base until their have returns (if under warranty).
But we don't sell to people who will tolerate that level of failure, nor rotate their hardware every three years.
It's gonna be painful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @08:07PM
Bitches about software quality; refuses to pay for high quality software.
By the way, hardware developers are hardly creating perfection. Feel free to lookup the errata list for your favorite processor sometime.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @08:58PM
Even a multi-billion-dollar corporation built around software development, Microsoft, produces absolutely atrocious junk! No, Apple's stuff isn't any better, and even Google's "Here, let us handle everything for you" Chromebooks frequently freeze or crash, like the bad old days on Mac OS Classic.
There is NO SUCH THING as "high quality" software; it's a all one giant hack by fanatical, megalomaniacal man-babies. BLECHHhhhh1h11!!!!11
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @10:21PM
Even a multi-billion-dollar corporation built around software development, Microsoft
You've been bamboozled.
M$ is not a software company that dishes out abuse but rather is an abuse company that dabbles in software.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @11:25PM
So all your examples are consumer oriented software/hardware companies? You can get a perpetual license to Windows and Office for a couple hundred dollars, yet they feature over 100 million LoC combined and represent over a millennium of total development time.
If you're so unhappy with the level of quality you're getting from Microsoft, why don't you buy a license for VxWorks? It's good enough to reliably run semi-autonomous robots driving on the surface of Mars. Maybe you don't want to buy it because it will cost you 10s of thousands of dollars for a single license, along with annual support that also goes for 10s of thousands? Maybe you don't want to buy it because it doesn't offer all the features you expect from a consumer oriented operating system? You know you can just pay your own team of developers to add whatever features you want?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @12:01AM
Intel's stuff is cheap, too, but has basically run the planet's computing systems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @01:39AM