A Product Change Notification released by Intel shows that as of the 14th February, they will be shipping the updated B3 stepping of the Cougar Point chipset, the component in Sandy Bridge motherboards that may cause them to fail prematurely.

This is an acceleration of the expected schedule, mostly to limit the damage caused to sales and reputation before the release of AMD's anticipated Bulldozer platform. We've also recently seen that Intel have seemingly accelerated their plans to showcase the successor to their Sandy bridge platform; Ivy Bridge, most likely for exactly the same reasons.

Although good news for consumers, it will still be a while before these parts reach retail channels.

Vortez have covered the Cougar Point failure and recall in detail over the last month. For more information, take a look at some of the articles below:



The changes that are brought with this new stepping are also outlined. There will be a change in revision ID from 04h to 05h, there will be a BIOS update to the chipset, B2 and B3 steppings will be pin-compatible, and a small metal layer change to the Cougar Point chipset to improve lifetime of chipset. The latter confirms that the problems Intel have had with the Cougar Point chipset have now been rectified.

To read more of the technical details, take a look at the Source.