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I just got off the phone with Intel’s Steve Smith (VP and Director of Intel Client PC Operations and Enabling) and got some more detail on this morning’s 6-series chipset/SATA bug. The Problem Cougar Point (Intel’s 6-series chipsets: H67/P67) has two sets of SATA ports: four that support 3Gbps operation, and two that support 6Gbps operation. Each set of ports requires its own PLL source.

Let us all warmly greet the Core i5-2300, the i5-2400, and the Core i7-2600, three desktop-bound members of Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge CPU brigade. You'll note that all three are fully dressed in their retail attire in an image coming from Malaysian electronics store Compuzone, which also has a full pricing and speed breakdown for these central processing units.

The Sandy Bridge processor--to be announced January 5--will pack media acceleration circuitry, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel... Sandy Bridge will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1--the latter used on Apple's Mac operating systems... Certain graphics chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia already support DirectX 11... Smith also reiterated that Intel is on track to deliver the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge silicon--the follow-on to Sandy Bridge--by the end of 2011... also repeated that Intel has invested "six to eight billion dollars to equip up to four factories for 22-nanometer production." ...A...

Apple will use Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs in its future laptops, no surprises there, but what's interesting about these forthcoming machines is that some of them might rely solely on Intel's chip for both general and graphical processing tasks. That's the word from the usual "sources familiar with Apple's plans," who expect "MacBook models with screen sizes of 13 inches and below" to eschew the inclusion of a discrete GPU and ride their luck on the improved graphical performance of Intel's upcoming do-it-all chip. There are currently no sub-13.3-inch MacBooks, so the suggestion of one is surely intriguing, but the...

Full list with prices Although we have been writing about Intel's Sandy Bridge lineup for quite some time, the guys from Expreview managed to score a full list of upcoming Sandy Bridge CPUs including the release date and the launch price. The specifications are pretty much what we have been writing for a while and there are no surprises. The interesting details is that Intel only plans to launch its quad-cores on 9th of January while the rest of the lineup should follow up in late February and in Q2 2011 for some Pentium branded models. The quad-core linup includes...