Intel's Arrandale chip shortage hindering Apple, other notebook makers
A report by PC World cited securities researcher CLSA Asia Pacific Markets as saying "A dearth of the [Arrandale] chips could cause delays in the rollout of sleek new laptops by three months or more," while noting that the supply problems could give Intel rival AMD an opportunity to win market share in the fast growing notebook arena.
Intel chief executive Paul Otellini admitted, "we were slightly behind, quite frankly, satisfying all the demand our customers wanted on 32nm [processors] in the first quarter even though we were producing much more than we first thought. We expect to catch up to that demand in the second quarter on 32nm over the course of the quarter."
Shortages of the new chips have caused open market prices to rise 20% over the contract price of the parts. The report cited IDC research director Shane Rau as saying the shortage of Arrandale chips is affecting smaller PC vendors the most, as large vendors get first priority from component makers during shortages. Smaller vendors "have to find other solutions," the report stated.
Apple's use of the Core 2 Duo in the 13" MacBook Pro (rather than the latest Core i3, and with no option to use other Arrandale processor upgrades) appears to have been an engineering decision made in response to realizing that Intel would not be able to deliver the new parts quickly enough.
Some orders of 15" MacBook Pros are being pushed back to the end of April or early May, particularly custom "built to order" models with Core i7 upgrades.
While the popular 13" model was initially sold out in some locations on its first day of availability, supplies have since seen fewer problems because of its use of more common CPUs unaffected by Intel's Arrandale supply problems.
Apple is rumored to be in discussions with AMD that could balance Apple's dependance upon Intel as the sole supplier for its Mac CPUs. AMD offers cheaper processor options and better graphics cores thanks to its acquisition of ATI, but does not currently match Intel in performance or efficiency in its mobile processors. Intel also has much greater manufacturing capacity.
23 Comments
Custom... Really?
There are hardly enough configuration variations offered for MacBook Pros for any model to be considered truly 'custom'.
If you choose any options othert han a straight off the shelf model, that makes it custom. No matter how small or large the change.
Apple's use of the Core 2 Duo in the 13" MacBook Pro (rather than the latest Core i3, and with no option to use other Arrandale processor upgrades) appears to have been an engineering decision.
I think it had nothing to do with supply. Core-i3 with Intel HD would not have been a viable improvement over a faster C2D with Nvidia 320M. it was the right way to go according to all benchmarks I've seen.
Custom... Really?
There are hardly enough configuration variations offered for MacBook Pros for any model to be considered truly 'custom'.
I'm astounded that even you would go so far outside reality as to suggest the BTO options are NOT customizing your order.
I don't know. Since every single "i" series MacBook Pro on the market is in stock and/or ships within 24hrs, I couldn't give a rat's ass about this "story".
(ie, at this point it has nothing to do with Apple MacBook Pros)
I doubt this is true. These engineering decisions had to be made months ago without knowledge of how many Arrandale parts were truly going to be available at launch. I'm more inline with the convention wisdom that states "Apple used Core 2 Duo in the MBP 13 because they didn't want to be stuck with Intel IGP so they kept the Nvidia board and added beefed up GPU"