Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Talking at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona, Alex Cho, president of HP's Personal Systems Business, claimed Intel's supply worries were across a portfolio of products, "not just specific CPUs".
[...] At the same event in the Catalonian capital, Gianfranco Lanci, chief operating officer at Lenovo, branded the lack of chips as a "concern" and a "limitation", saying the global PC market shipments could have grown at 7 to 8 per cent in Q3 if availability had improved, rather than the 4 per cent recorded.
[...] Steve Brazier, CEO at Canalys, said the "short answer is that we don't know [what is causing Intel's shortages]. And they are not telling anybody, so nobody completely knows why. All we can do is speculate that they made a serious software design flaw."
He added: "The interesting thing is the PC vendors do not know, they have no better information than we have. There is no sign of a short-term fix."
Of course, this has played into the hands of Intel nemesis AMD, which Brazier claimed was "now equal or ahead in performance – and it's cheaper". The Register is awaiting CPU market share figures from the analyst.
[...] We are also told that organisations, including financial institutions and cloud providers, are replacing current Intel chips with ones that have Meltdown and Spectre fixes built in.
An Intel spokesperson sent us a lengthy statement: "We continue working to improve the supply-demand balance for our PC customers. We invested an added $1bn in capital to achieve more capacity and flexible supply. As a result, we increased our 14nm capacity by 25 per cent while also ramping 10nm production.
"We've improved our supply every quarter. However, in the first half of 2019 we saw PC customer demand that exceeded our expectations and surpassed third-party forecasts. We are actively working to address the supply-demand challenge, and we expect supply in the second half will be up compared to the first half. We continue to prioritise available output toward the newest generation Intel Core products that support our customers' high-growth segments, and we plan to further increase our output capacity in 2020." ®
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Monday October 21 2019, @12:38AM (1 child)
If the strategy is to bleed profit margin instead of customers, they're going about it the right way.
I'm sure they know how to price things so they can stay a comfortable margin "behind schedule" and know they'll sell every single processor they make.
Institutional momentum is where Intel is probably targeting this move. If they're only 30% more expensive than AMD instead of 80%, it becomes easier to just stick with the same vendor supply and support infrastructure. They mainly want to hold on to customers on the fence about switching to AMD products.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday October 21 2019, @12:37PM
But if the plan is for Intel to take customers away from AMD by undercutting pricing and therefore selling more chips, Intel has to actually have enough chips to sell. TFS claims otherwise. Either the plan is broken, or I'm not understanding the plan.