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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Intel is setting aside money to fix a hardware issue [anandtech.com] with its Atom C2000 SoCs, which are used in products such as servers, routers, and network attached storage:

Last week, Paul Alcorn over at Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com] 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.

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