WHY INTEL'S CHIPSET SHORTAGE HAPPENED

This situation arose because Intel wanted the market and the money associated with it, a short term gain at long term expense. It play some really heavy power games here, more or less forcing companies to buy a chipset with each chip because bundles were available, singles were not. Want CPUs in a timely fashion? Guess what you have to buy? This lead to a glut of gray market chipsets at blow out prices. Intel got the full price for the chipsets, with, ummm, "generously spread marketing dollars" to soothe the pain. See the Centrino programme for more.

Basically what happened was it killed its so called friends, and for a while, that worked just fine. It left just enough wiggle room for the Taiwanese chipset makers to survive, but barely, and I mean barely. Intel made sure there was no money in chipsets unless it decreed that there would be, and since it can shut that pipe down on a whim in less time than it takes to get a chipset to market, the sane vendors ran for the door. No one else was dumb enough to enter the Intel chipset market, and this situation is likely to continue. They planned the killing, and, er, executed.