Kerching! Intel PC chip shortage over just in time for everyone to buy computers for pandemic home working

Intel today reported a bumper first quarter of the year, with a big shift to homeworking worldwide partially fueling double-digit growth of its PC processor sales. Chipzilla said its long-running shortage of consumer parts was over, leading to PC manufacturers snapping up its components amid growing demand. This, along with …

[Anonymous Coward]

Rigging the market?

"Chipzilla said its long-running shortage of consumer parts was over, leading to PC manufacturers snapping up its components amid growing demand"

Were they simply witholding the supply at their end ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Rigging the market?

That would not make sense - why say "no" to making money?

More likely when 14nm fab output could not meet demand, production of high-margin parts was prioritized. Specifically server Xeons for the cloud.

One thing that has changed, other than fab capacity, is AMD's introduction of Rome server parts.

That has forced Intel to cut prices on the highest-end Xeons (e.g. you can now get a 28-core part for around half the price they were in the middle of last year).

So the big Xeons no longer have that massive profit margin... I have no idea whether that is part of the puzzle, though!

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: Rigging the market?

Not disputing your point, though it does feel like a startlingly convenient coincidence.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Rigging the market?

It may well do, but for it not to be a coincidence would imply that Intel "knew" that "something" was coming. Is it also a coincidence that tinfoil was in short supply just after Xmas too? :-)

[Annihilator]

AMD

Blimey - people are still buying Intel kit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: AMD

Intel kit still being bought by companies that run windows, office360 and use netgear infrastructure. Some people just don't care/know better

[Mandoscottie]

Re: AMD

yep cos all of that needs more than 8 cores....pfft, ill take less cores, and gain stable chipset drivers tyvm for corp.

chosen for a reason ;) none you list.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'm not in the target market as I keep buying used/refurbished laptops for my families home use, I bought each of my children a T530 a little over a month ago so that they can do their school work from home and my now old T420 still works wonderfully, even with the spinning rust HDD.

Having said all that my next computer will be a proper desktop (AMD) as working from home since the COVID-19 crisis has forced me to setup a proper little space to keep a desktop.

[Boothy]

Loving my home built Ryzen 3800X system running on an NVMe M2 drive. So fast at everything, and running VMs is a breeze! So much better than the old i7 3770k it replaced!

[Sandtitz]

"So much better than the old i7 3770k it replaced!"

It better be since that AMD was introduced just last year and with twice as many physical cores and has higher base + turbo frequencies, lots more cache, has higher TDP etc. That 3770k is an 8-year-old model...

My i7 laptop I'm writing this post is much faster than the K6-2 I had 20 years ago, believe it or not!