Intel customers moan about CPU shortages

Tom's Hardware reports Intel's OEM clients are openly lamenting the shortage of Intel processors. Over at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona, both Lenovo and HP executives were complaining that the continued scarcity of Intel processors is costing them a lot of revenue:

The Register reported this morning that HP and Lenovo executives openly discussed the ongoing shortage at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona. HP Personal Systems Business president Alex Cho reportedly said that it's "no surprise that it's been a hard year" because the processor shortage "makes life more complex." He also said the shortage affects Intel's entire product portfolio, not specific processors, and that people can "expect it to continue for another quarter or two."

Lenovo COO Gianfranco Lanci was said to have blamed the continued scarcity of Intel's processors for inhibiting the PC market's growth over the last quarter. The market grew around 4%, but Lanci said it could've grown 7-8%. Lanci also said the shortage resulted either from production issues that Intel should've resolved by now or from an underlying problem with the company's processor architecture that "is unpredictable." Either way, Lenovo's clearly not happy about the situation.

Canalys CEO Steve Brazier added that PC makers have no clue about why Intel CPUs are so hard to come by as Intel remains tight-lipped about what's causing this shortage. The PC vendors reportedly do not have more information than the general public and it doesn't appear there's a sign of a short-term fix.

Tom's Hardware asked Intel for a comment and received the following statement:

"We continue working to improve the supply-demand balance for our PC customers. We invested an added $1 billion in capital to achieve more capacity and flexible supply. As a result, we increased our 14nm capacity by 25% 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 prioritize 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."