Chip set woes are over, Intel vows
Intel launches its latest family of chip sets and says its supply problems are past
Follow @infoworldIntel launched its latest family of chip sets amid high fives between workers and several whoops proclaiming "We're back," and promised the resources were aligned to make sure there wouldn't be a repeat of the shortages the company ran into last year.
A PC chip set is the pair of chips inside a computer that regulate the flow of data between the microprocessor and other chips on board, such as graphics and memory. It's also a set of chips Intel has had a lot of trouble with over the past several months.
"We have had our supply problems, and clearly you, our customers, have suffered too," said Richard Malinowski, general manager of Intel's chip set group, to a room full of Taiwanese PC company representatives in Taipei on Wednesday.
Around the middle of 2005, companies in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia began complaining they couldn't get enough Intel chip sets to meet soaring PC demand. The problem continued until early this year, and has been blamed for Intel's declining financial performance as well as allowing rival AMD to snatch away some market share.
Chip sets have to be made specifically for certain processors and other chips, and they can't be interchanged. So a shortage of Intel chip sets would, in theory, boost demand for AMD processors and chip sets to meet PC demand.
To ensure there are no more supply problems, Intel has set aside two chip plants to manufacture its new 965 chip set family, ensuring plentiful supply, Malinowski said. The chips will be made on 300 millimeter (12-inch) silicon wafers, using 90-nanometer production technology. The size of the wafers is similar to a dinner plate, 300mm in diameter. The chips are etched on the wafers at feature sizes of 90-nanometers. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.
"We, Intel chip sets, are back," Malinowski said, a phrase he repeated several times during the conference.
The 965 chip set family will come in three flavors, P, G, and Q.
The P965 Express chip set is already shipping in volume to PC makers, Intel said. The chip set is designed to work with the company's new Core 2 Duo desktop processor, which will go on sale next month.
The other two chip sets should ship around August. The G965 chip set is made for use with Intel Viiv products and offers advanced video and graphics performance for home users. The Q965 chip set is made for Intel vPro office computing.
Intel's Viiv is a package of chips consisting of a dual-core processor, chip set, and a networking chip aimed at the market for digital home products. It's modeled on Intel's Centrino, which similarly grouped a package of chips for laptops.
The Q965 chip set is aimed at Intel's vPro initiative, a collection of hardware and software services for business computing. VPro is meant to lower IT maintenance costs, increase security, and reduce electric bills for businesses.
