A single bad transistor on the P67 chipset may cost Intel a billion dollars.
Unfortunately for Intel, a bug slipped into the i5 Sandy Bridge P67 chipset in the form of a bad transistor in the controller subsystem support chips. Sandy Bridge is Intel's 32nm second generation of Core processor.
To put this in perspective, the dual core version of Sandy Bridge CPU has over 500 million transistors and the quad core version has 995 million transistors.
Cost estimates are putting the total expense for Intel at around a billion dollars. That includes $700 million for handling the recall and $300 million in lost sales.
The problem occured in the PLL (phase lock loop) clock tree of the 3 Gbit/s controller. The circuit was biased at too high a voltage for the design and this resulted in an excessively high leakage current which changes the system's characteristics and causes the controller to fail.
The problem does not always show up and tends to occur when the system is stressed.
The video shows how you can work around the problem by only using the SATA ports that are not affected by the flaw while you wait for your free replacement mother board.
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