Intel in all sorts of trouble

DEALERS TRYING TO BUY the new 1.7GHz Pentium 4 microprocessors have been told they will have to wait at least four weeks for reasonable supplies.

Intel introduced the chip at a price of $352 only 10 days ago, to a fanfare of price cutting trumpeting all over the newspapers and Web.

There are also shortages of the 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz Pentium 4s at the largest distributors too, we understand, with only limited quantities of the products in stock and with some shortages .

The Pentium 4 1.7GHz bundled with no RDRAM RIMMs (which is what most dealers want), does not even have an estimated time of arrival at one of the US' biggest distributors.

Boxed 1.7GHz processors bundled with RDRAM are slated to arrive in limited quantities at the end of May.

Said a dealer: "There are no P4s faster than 1.4GHz in the system to be bought. The parts that we need the most are ETA'd a month or more away."µ

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