FOX Business reports that AMD is benefiting from Intel's current Sandy Bridge platform design "woes" thanks to OEMs and retailers approaching the company for additional supply. The news arrives just after Intel announced that it would resume shipments of the faulty Cougar Point chipsets for use in specific hardware configurations.
In an interview with Dow Jones Newswires, Leslie Sobon, AMD vice president of product and platform marketing, said the company has received hardware requests as a direct result of Intel's issues. "We have some customers and retailers who have come to us specifically as a result of Intel's chip problem," Sobon said. "Some retailers have had to take things off their shelves, so they call us to ask what they could get from our OEMs that's similar. And OEMs are asking us for product, as well."
Sobon admitted that most of the requests are for mainstream setups, typically notebooks costing more than $500. Some are also requesting the company's lower-end Fusion chips given that the mainstream version isn't expected to ship until mid-2011. Of course, there are also requests for AMD's older mainstream computer processors. As Sobon indicated, retailers have contacted AMD about PC's with similar price points or screen sizes.
Naturally Sobon wouldn't reveal the identities of the OEMs and retailers. She also couldn't provide any projections about the financial impact the sudden boost in requests have provided. "We can't quantify it because we're smack in the middle of it," Sobon said. "It's hard to find a pattern because it's different by market and retailer, but it's all over the place in terms of opportunity."
Last week Intel announced that the 6 Series chipset (P67 and H67) had the potential to impact certain PC system configurations--namely a problem related to the 3 Gbps SATA ports 2 to 5 (0 and 1, which are SATA 6gbps ports, are unaffected). Intel said that the affected SATA ports within the chipsets may degrade in performance over time, and potentially completely failing.
Intel is currently working on a new version of the chipset which is expected to head to manufacturers by the end of February. Unfortunately, the motherboard shipments aren't expected to reach "full volume recovery" until April. "We continue to work with our customers to try to get this addressed as completely and quickly as possible," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said Tuesday.
Last week Intel estimated the cost of repairs and replacements of the faulty Sandy Bridge chipsets to be around $700 million. The issue itself is expected to cut first-quarter revenue by $300 million but may not hurt the company's overall full-year revenue.
