Bean counters at Digitimes Research have been adding up some numbers and dividing them by their shoe size and have reached the conclusion that Intel CPUs will see their supply gap shrink by three percent
The shortage will be greater for the Core i3. Previously it has been far Core i5 as the series hit hardest by shortages.
It all went tits up for Intel in August with major brands such as HP, Dell and Lenovo all experiencing supply gaps of over five percent at their worst.
It had been widely believed that the shortages would get better after Christmas. But the supply gap in the fourth quarter of 2018 still stayed at the same level as that in the third as HP launched a second wave of CPU inventory buildup during the last quarter of the year, prompting other vendors to follow suit.
The shortage was particularly hard on Taiwan-based vendors which saw their supply gaps expand from a single digit percentage previously to over 10 per cent in the fourth quarter. With all the impacts, the notebook market continued suffering a four to fiveper cent supply gap in the fourth quarter of 2018.
The Core i5 series for mainstream models, and the Atom, Celeron and Pentium series for entry level ones saw the most serious shortages in the second half of 2018.
Within the Core i5 family, those based on Kaby Lake R architecture featuring a quad-core design instead of the traditional dual-core one had the worst shortfall as they were key products in Intel's promotional campaign in 2018 and increased the consumption of the company's already limited wafer capacity.
Apollo Lake- and Gemini Lake-based processors for the entry-level segment were second worst in terms of shortages as Intel had shifted most of its capacity to make high-end processors that offered better profit.
Lenovo, which primarily focuses on mid-range and entry-level models, had a supply gap of hundreds of thousands CPUs in the second half of the year. White-box players in China have even been denied any supply of Intel's entry-level processors since September 2018.
Even the fruity cargo cu and a lt Apple suffered from Intel’s shortages. It’s latest MacBook Air released at the end of October 2018, uses Intel's 14nm Amber Lake processor which was a victim of the CPU shortages.
One of the main beneficiaries of Intel’s cock up has been AMD which has seen its share in worldwide notebook shipments have also been picking up gradually from only 9.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2018 to 15.8 per cent in the first quarter of 2019. As more
Chromebooks are expected to come with AMD processors in the second quarter and many vendors will begin mass shipping AMD-based entry-level notebooks, AMD's share is expected to rise to 18 per cent in the second quarter of 2018.
Some analysts are saying that AMD will not be able to capitalise on the mess in the long term. Intel's newly established 14nm capacity to begin contributing shipments, the second quarter is expected to be the peak for AMD's share in worldwide notebook shipments in 2019.
Intel is expected to have new 14nm capacity join production in the second half of 2019. Intel's existing 14nm fabs are mainly located in the US and Ireland and the newly expanded capacity in Arizona, the US is expected to begin volume production in July or August, to boost Intel's overall 14nm capacity by 25 per cent and completely resolve the shortage problem
