Intel recalling Sandy Bridge processors

It's about time for the people running Intel's chipset division to start losing their jobs. Since they greedily kicked NVidia out of the chipset business, they've done a great job of proving how bad a decision that was for consumers:

Intel's integrated graphics performance is still pathetic, though it has at least gotten up to the lowest level of performance that AMD and NVidia have been willing to put on the market. This has been a real sore point for anybody trying to make a good low-power notebook (ie. Apple).

Intel's chipsets have been slow to pick up new features, with this latest generation being the first to offer 6Gbps SATA (which is necessary to get full performance out of last year's high-end SSDs), albeit only two ports at that speed, and they won't be adding USB3 support until their next micro-architecture revision, which is at least a year away.

To top it off, the latest generation of chipsets exhibit one of the most disgusting segmentation strategies Intel has ever tried: the Sandy Bridge CPUs have on-die graphics chips that are an unavoidable cost for consumers, and their performance is insufficient for even casual gaming. Their redeeming quality is the top-notch transcoding engine, which offers higher performance than any CPU or discrete GPU can manage. However, in order to use it, you have to use the integrated graphics. There's a software hack that will let you use it with discrete GPUs, but only on the multimedia-oriented H67 chipset. The performance-oriented P67 chipset (which is the only one to support multiple discrete graphics cards or overclocking) completely disables the integrated graphics. If you want to build a gaming system, Intel forces you to pay for a couple hundred million extra transistors on your CPU that you won't be allowed to use.

After all that, it's hard to feel sorry for Intel's biggest CPU architecture launch ever being ruined like this. If they still had a third-party chipset partner, then they would at least be able to sell some Sandy Bridge processors in February.

On the bright side, this only affects users with more than 2 SATA devices.

For those of us who only have 2, is there a way to get recalled chips on the cheap?

The headline is wrong; they're not recalling the processors.