Asustek Computer has seen its shipments to the DIY sector and related motherboards affected by Intel's supply strategy for CPUs, with the prospects that the CPU shortages, particularly those for desktop PCs, will continue into the second quarter of 2019, according to company CEO Jerry Shen.
The continued CPU supply crunch, escalating US-China trade disputes, and increasing competition in the notebook segment in Europe have pressed down Asustek's "operational visibility" for the fourth quarter of 2018 to the lowest level of 20% compared to an over 50% seen in previous years, Shen said.
Although Intel has pledged to address the supply issues since September and has continued to pour investments to ramp up output from its 10nm process, the tight CPU supplies have not been solved as the US chipmaker has given the priority to the production of high-end Xeon and Core series CPUs, instead of CPUs for the entry-level or other consumer models, Shen indicated.
CPU shortages to continue into 2Q19, says Asustek CEO
This intel "shortage" remains unexplained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 15 2018, @11:27PM
I would suspect the larger issue is they forecasted to have fabs producing 10nm chips by now. So instead of having processors on 10nm and chipsets/other lower-priority components on 14nm, everything has advanced to 14nm but little/no new capacity has been built for 14nm chips.