Not bad going at all! So Intel's R&D budget may be larger than anyone else's but within on year they've had the SB SATA issue, SB-E revision C1 not supporting vt-d and now X79 has lost PCIe 3.0. That's two for chipsets and one for the CPU division. Wonder if there's something in that: I have long considered that Intel's chipset division is mainly dominant due to them patenting their CPU sockets (not quite as useless an 'invention' as inkjet cartridges with patented ink-level chips but similar enough). Now that they no longer have any competition on chipsets they seem to be getting complacent.
Of course for Intel chipset are also a useful place to use previous process nodes lines so they don't have to upgrade all their plants at once.
SB Sata was an issue with the controller, overvolting I believe causing it to die sooner than it should.
I believe Intel actually discovered the problem before it could cause any problems and paid for the mobo replacements. I thought they handled it rather well.
SB-E not supporting vt-d wasn't a major issue, since it was stated that a later stepping would add it. Not everyone needs vt-d, those who did could simply wait. It's not like AMD offered any compelling reason not to wait.
AMD still doesn't have PCIe 3.0 support, so even if Intel is having some issues they never advertised 2011 as 3.0 compliant in the first place so once again it's a moot point.
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