Posted on Monday, August 17 2015 @ 16:24 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
After a comment by the CEO of Asustek about the limited availability of Intel's Skylake processors, the chip giant confirmed that its new chips are indeed in short supply. A reason for the limited availability wasn't provided, but Intel did mention that availability should improve as the third quarter progresses.
“In September we are going to produce a lot of ‘Skylake’ products, but we expect significant shortage of ‘Skylake’ globally, not just for Asus,” said Jerry Shen, chief executive officer of Asustek Computer, during the company’s earnings conference with investors and financial analysts***. “That is why in August we have Windows 10[-based products], but ‘Skylake’ only accounts for a very small percentage. In the fourth quarter, ‘Skylake’ will take a higher percentage. […] Skylake is in significant shortage right now in the third quarter.”
The reasons for tight supply of Intel’s latest CPUs are not clear, but it is possible that Intel strategically delays high-volume shipments of certain “Skylake” parts in order to give its customers time to sell off existing central processing units.
The report also makes note of shipping times, even if Intel sorts out Skylake supply next month it will still take some time for Skylake-based PCs to hit retail shelves as these are shipped by sea:
It should be noted that nowadays the vast majority of personal computers are shipped by sea. It takes 42 days (including customs) for a ship to reach Europe from Taiwan, according to Asustek. Freight shipping time from Taiwan to the U.S. is around 20 days. As a result, after Asus (or other PC makers) gets the new processors and manufactures its computers, it will take at least 1.5 months for actual products to reach the market.
If Intel increases supply of “Skylake” products in late September, actual chips will show up in retail one to four weeks after it ships chips to its clients (i.e., in October). However, actual notebooks powered by “Skylake” processors will only get to the market in November.
Source: KitGuru
