On March 1st, it was revealed that Intel's upcoming fourth generation "Haswell" processors was having issues when waking from S3 sleep with a device plugged into a USB 3.0 port. Specifically this implementation problem resulted in a number of nuisance issues such as having blank pages displayed in PDFs and video that stops and cannot be resumed.
To resolve this issue, Intel has now issued an official Product Change Notification (PCN) that alters the chipset stepping from C1 to C2, a hardware fix that is expected to affect the delivery dates of a fairly wide range of products. According to the release, this revision includes the Z87, H87, Q85, Q87, C222, C224 and C226, QM87, HM87 and HM86 chipsets.
When asked for comment, Intel provided the following statement to Hardware.info:
“4th gen Core is on track for a mid-year launch. Intel issued a PCN documenting a chipset USB errata and stating that chipsets with the errata will be in production during the initial ramp. But Intel has confirmed that there is no chance of data loss or corruption. This issue has only been observed with a small subset of USB SuperSpeed thumb drives and does not affect other USB peripherals. We take all customer issues seriously and should any customer have a question or concern they can always contact Intel customer support.”
Though Haswell's S3 sleep issues all fell in the "nuisance" category and could all be resolved by a simple restart of the affected application, it's excellent to see that Intel has officially acknowledged the problem, implemented a fix and perhaps most importantly, not knowingly put defective products onto the market.
