The Intel Sandy Bridge flaw that is affecting the Cougar Point chipset variants has been pinpointed. A phone call between Intelís VP and Director of Intel Client PC Operations and Enabling, Steve Smith and Anand Lai Shimpi of Anandtech has revealed that this issue lies with a transistor in the 3Gbps PLL clocking tree. The transistor is leaking current, which can cause the 3Gbps SATA ports to lose performance or fail completely. The 6Gbps ports are unaffected by the issue as they have independent clocking trees.
