Tag: intel

Intel refuses to give up on tablets

Posted on December 9, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoNever one to give up even when the battle’s already lost, chip behemoth Intel is apparently preparing a big notebook push.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, which claims to have information frm the supply chain, Intel will unveil a plethora of chips that support entry level and high end tablets.

And, in bitter news for its long time “friend” Microsoft, Intel will introduce CPUs that support Android operating systems at the end of this year.

Bay Trail Android CPUs aimed at seven inch tablets will cost between $99 and $129 while it will also introduce other chips in the first quarter of next year costing between $149 to $199.

Bay Trail and Cherry Trail CPUs will look to target eight to 10 inch tablets and cost a staggering $199 to $249.

And in September next year, Cherry Trail will emerge from the factories using 14 nanometre “Airmont” manufactures – Another Trail blazer wll be Willow Trail at the same time, using 14 nanometre Goldmont, according to Digitimes.

And it seems Chipzilla hasn’t given up the ghost on smartphones and will intro 22 nanometre chips.

It’s hard to see how Intel can possibly catch up this late in the game, but it sure looks like it’s going to give it a stab.

Intel doesn’t back Lady Geek dot com

Posted on November 15, 2013 by - News

Belinda ParmarA woman on the radio this morning hit out at womens’ magazines for not including enough information on gadgets and the like.

Belinda Parmar, the CEO of the agency with a website at ladygeek.com (pictured) said in a discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that technology “empowered” women and said magazines such as Glamour didn’t include enough features about tech.

The agency numbers among its clients Nokia, Dell, Microsoft, Sony, Vodafone,Kaspersky, Ubisoft and, er, the BBC. But not Intel.

According to its web page, 80 percent of all tech decisions are influenced by women but only three percent of advertising creative directors are women.

Technology is commoditised now so no one really cares about it anymore apart from Microsoft, Sony and the rest.

Intel thinks anthropologist will fix its business

Posted on November 13, 2013 by - News

bummerGenevieve Bell and another 100 or so social scientists are trying to save Intel’s “flailing business”.

Bell, an anthropologist and an Intel fellow, and her team, are racking their brains to figure out what gadgets people will use in the future, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

We told Intel years ago it should bung StrongARM chips into small, portable devices that consumed little power.  But Intel can be rather hard of hearing.

The Mercury News reckons that Intel’s fate is in the 200 pair of hands in Bell’s team seeing as PCs ain’t what they used to be.

The newspaper quotes Bell as saying she couldn’t imagine being in a better place, while another researcher is quoted as saying that Intel “is highly attuned to long term thinking”.

Really?

The Itanium lives on in HP kit

Posted on November 4, 2013 by - News, Products

HPWe don’t know how many Itanium microprocessors Intel still manufactures in its wafer manufactories.

The chip hasn’t been an Intel runaway success but today HP said it lives on its mission critical HP Nonstop technology for X86 servers.

According to HP, eight of the top 10 world banks use HP Nonstop and now the company is selling Integrity blade servers based on the Itanium 9500 series.

HP is, it said already developing tech to extend Nonstop to the X86 but it willtake several years before adoption, the company said.

Blade systems NB56000c-cg and NB56000c are already available, with prices varying. Resellers should contact their HP account manager for more information.

Intel seems to have lost its way

Posted on November 4, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Sean MaloneyThe news that Intel’s Galileo is on its way just underlines to me how the chip giant has lost its way.

The “open source” computer costs $70, and uses its Quark microprocessor. Intel clearly thinks it will compete against the highly successful Raspberry Pi but clearly it hasn’t got a chance to play catch up.

The launch mirrors Intel’s late attempt to climb on the tablet bandwagon by cutting the price of its Atom microprocessor to compete with ARM and Nvidia based chips.  But it hasn’t got an earthly here, either.  Manufacturers are very chary about using anything with the Intel name associated with the tin. Again, that’s underlined by vendors’ reluctance to be associated with Intel.

Cheap is everything in the tablet market now and even though Intel’s chips might be, er, cheap as chips, the economics of this don’t really make a lot of sense to anyone. Sure, Intel has heaps of capacity but that in itself is part of the problem. State of the art fabs are really expensive these days and the volume game just doesn’t fit Intel’s business model.

In reality, the chip giant really has very little new to say. The new broom in the shape of CEO  Brian Kzanic appears to be attempting the Herculean task of cleaning the Augean Stables not just of the dung but also of a heap of very good people who have let their legs do the walking.

Datacentre business no doubt is still healthy for Chipzilla, but on the other hand independent market research shows that the notebook market is on the wane.  Sure, enterprises will refresh their notebooks but with the arrival of BYOD, there’s a level of ambiguity which must leave Intel more than a little bemused.

In truth, Intel has had zilch to say in the last three years as smartphones and tablets transformed the “traditional” Wintel model.

As part of the antitrust agreement following the demise of DEC, Intel found itself with StrongARM devices. At the time, we asked top executives from the firm why it didn’t just cut the Gordian Knot and produce a highly portable ARM based device?  The answer, of course, was that Intel was on the Centrino notebook gravy train. Sean Maloney, now a non-executive director at Chinese foundry SMIC, realised that the Atom chip might well cannibalise the notebook market but nobody at Intel appeared to have looked further than the next three quarters and see its dominance becoming more and more eroded.

Of course, Intel has oodles of cash in the bank but oodles don’t last forever.  Re-engineering its business model is, for Intel, a far from trivial task. As an Intel watcher for the last 30 years, I will be most interested to see what happens in the next 12 to 18 months.

Old PCs are costing SMBs time and money

Posted on October 30, 2013 by - News

ancient-laptopSmall businesses are bleeding cash thanks to their reliance on antiquated PCs. According to Intel’s Small Business PC Refresh Study, the average small business worker loses one work week per year due to old PCs.

The Techaisle survey covered 736 businesses across six countries and found that more than 36 percent of them use PCs that are more than four years old. The old boxes require more maintenance, repairs and they exhibit security and performance issues, all of which have a negative impact on productivity.

Worse, the average repair costs for older PCs usually equal or exceed the cost of buying a brand new one. On average small businesses spend a staggering $427 to repair a PC that’s four years or older, which is 1.3 times the repair cost of PCs that are less than four years old. Almost a half of respondents did not even know that Redmond is planning to cut off support for XP next year.

Curiously, businesses in the US tend to use the oldest PCs on the planet – 8 percent of them are using PCs that are five years or older. In India, just one percent of small businesses use ancient PCs.

The results aren’t very surprising. A couple of months ago Intel released another survey which found that the average age of PCs is going up and it’s now at four years or more. The upgrade cycle is getting longer and there’s practically no incentive to upgrade for many users.

SkySQL $20 million investment led by Intel

Posted on October 23, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoOpen source database firm, SkySQL, has raked in $20 million in series B funding from, among others, Intel Capital.

The investment will go toward funding further development of SkySQL’s MariaDB database server.

Intel Capital made investments totaling $350 million last year, with 57% of that in businesses based outside North America. The other funds contributing to the $20 million investment in SkySQL include California Technology Ventures, Finnish Industry Investment, Open Ocean Capital and Spintop Private Partners.

Earlier this year, SkySQL merged with Monty Program, who developed the MariaDB open source relational database – and, as far as this hack can tell, had nothing to do with dead parrots.

MariaDB has curried favour with many in the application developer community and with database admins – according to analysts 451 Group, MariaDB has an increasing market share due to becoming the the favoured SQL technology in popular Linux distributions such as OpenSUSE and Fedora.

SkySQL’s CEO Patrik Sallner said: “For large-scale internet players like Google and Wikipedia, MariaDB database server delivers clear benefits over existing relational databases. With this funding we plan to deliver commercial solutions that make it even easier for enterprises of any size to run MariaDB databases at scale. We have raised this latest round of investment to enhance MariaDB’s position as the world’s fastest growing open source relational database and to continue to foster a vibrant community around the project.

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Intel promises more cheap tablets and hybrids. Again

Posted on October 17, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel’s new CEO Brian Krzanich is at it again. He is promising $99 tablets, along with $299 Haswell laptops, $349 2-in-1 hybrids and $299 Bay Trail clamshells. The prices aren’t exactly new – Krzanich talked about $99 tablets back at IDF 2013.

In the meantime the first Bay Trail products have started to appear, although they are not widely available yet. Early benchmarks found that Bay Trail tablets were roughly on a par with the latest ARM SoCs from Nvidia and Qualcomm. The bad news is that Intel’s chips are manufactured using a superior process (22nm vs. 28nm) and that they cost a bit more than ARM chips. Intel’s official prices for Bay Trail-T SoCs are $32 to $37, while high-end ARM chips are estimated to cost $20 to $28.

With that in mind, it is obvious that Intel doesn’t stand to make much cash on $99 tablets, which don’t exactly have much room for Intel’s traditionally high margins. The price points for hybrids and laptops are more realistic, but demand for Windows hybrids has yet to materialise.

That is a bigger problem than actual hardware. Intel’s new x86 SoCs have what it takes both in terms of performance and efficiency, but they are going after a limited market that simply isn’t there, at least not yet. Aggressive pricing should help, but Krzanich stated that the price cuts should also involve OEMs and ODMs.

This will be a bitter pill to swallow for many of them, as they are already struggling to make ends meet in a slow PC market. They would effectively have to give up some of their margins to hit Intel’s price points and at the same time they could cannibalize their own product lines.

This is where the failure of Windows RT and the lacklustre market performance of Windows 8 tablets could back come to haunt Intel. While PC makers were waiting for competitive x86 parts to stick in their hybrids and tablets, most of them decided to roll out ARM-based products with Android, dropping RT in the process and limiting Redmond’s footprint on the tablet market. For example, Asus, Lenovo and HP are already selling Android hybrids. Lenovo even introduced its first Android IdeaPad laptop a few days ago and it should sell for less than 200 pounds.

The only thing Intel has going for it in this segment is x86 support, i.e. the ability to run Windows 8 and offer hybrids that can use the wide range of Windows productivity apps. However, vendors appear to be focusing on higher performance Haswell tablets for Windows 8, which can’t come close to the $299 mark for a variety of reasons.

 

Semiconductor market to grow three percent

Posted on September 13, 2013 by - News

silicon-waferThe worldwide semiconductor market is expected to grow 3 percent this year. The market has been seeing sequential growth for several consecutive quarters and most vendors believe they will end the year on a positive note, just barely.

“It has been a tough few years for the semiconductor industry. While we haven’t seen a dramatic decline in overall revenues since the 2008/2009 period the market has been pretty stagnant since 2010,” comments Peter Cooney, practice director. “We will see some growth in 2013 as the wider economic environment improves but major market growth is not expected until later in 2014, early 2015.”

The year will be remembered for several major mergers and acquisitions rather than record growth. Fujitsu and Panasonic semicon divisions are merging and Micron has scooped up Elpida. Intel has strengthened its portfolio with the ST-Ericsson GPU unit merger, while Broadcom bought Renesas Mobile’s LTE assets.

ABI Research noted that consolidation in the industry should come as no surprise, as chipmakers are forced to deal with far stiffer competition and lower margins.

“Margins are falling and the competitive environment is tough—especially in the mobile device market—this is driving vendors to re-evaluate their overall strategy and pull out of some of their once major markets. We have seen a number of major vendors exit the mobile device market – Freescale, TI, STMicroelectronics, and Renesas and we expect there are more to come,” said Cooney.

 

Intel becomes irrelevant

Posted on September 12, 2013 by - News, Opinions

The mighty dinosaur IntelIt was formerly a chip giant but pretty soon now some archaeologist will uncover the bones of Chipzilla as the lumbering dinosaur nears the end of its existence.

At the Intel Developer Forum this year, Intel’s newly hatched CEO, Brian Krzanich, attempted to breathe new life into the diplodocus he tends by warbling on about healthcare and tablets. He must realise, of course, that to somewhat mix metaphors, Chipzilla has missed the boat.

The writing was on the wall for Intel some years ago but because the company is such a giant, the tiny brain wasn’t getting messages from its extremities that it was slowly dying.

It is a climate change in the egosystem that will spell the end for Intel because, in the marketing babble of the present age, its business model is clearly “unsustainable”.

Intel could only continue to churn out new processes and chips as long as it had a virtual monopoly in the market.  A new fab costs billions to produce and profit is predicated on the fact that it essentially controlled the market.

The giant appears to have missed the fact that handset manufacturers didn’t and don’t want to be locked into the same model as the PC industry.  Now, anyone with a smartphone or tablet is toting around an extremely sophisticated computer and no-one in their right minds wants to spend thousands on a PC unless they’re forced to.  As recent market research has shown, the days of PCs are pretty much numbered and, of course, like its evil twin Microsoft, Intel forgot about the mantra it used to chant, that mantra called convergence.

It will take a while for Intel to die because it is such a lumbering creature, but a model that requires billions to develop new processes simply based on PC sales just won’t work anymore. And if Intel thinks that tablets or smartphones will save its bacon, then it is living in cloud cuckoo land.

In some ways, we must lament the coming death of Chipzilla.  It had some fine people working for it and its process technology was next to none.  But greed and its virtual monopoly meant that it was viewing the world wearing blinkers and its own momentum and size prevented it from taking vital decisions.

Intel promises sub-$100 tablets, has some convincing to do

Posted on September 11, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel hasn’t had much luck with tablets. Very few devices have Intel innards and most of the ones that do are low-volume Windows 8 tablets, accompanied by a nasty price tag. However, there have been some moves towards cheaper Intel tablets in recent months. A number of vendors has rolled out Windows 8 products powered by Atom parts with relatively decent prices.

Now Intel is taking it a step further by promising sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year. It sounds a bit like a general saying his troops will be home for Christmas and here is why. Intel just has a terrible track record when it comes to making any promises involving pricing. This is a relatively new thing for Intel, usually it tried not to make any predictions at all, but over the past couple of years it made a few, and they were all dead wrong.

It started a few months after the fist Ultrabooks were announced. The press pounced on Intel, demanding to know how it plans get a lot of traction on skinny, overpriced notebooks with prices starting at $999. Intel’s response was pretty clumsy. It promised to do its best to bring the prices down to $699 by the end of 2012, then $599, depending on who was on stage. Then it started making similar promises about hybrids and x86 tablets. All the promises had one thing in common – for all intents and purposes none of them came true. To be fair to Intel, some of them were quite vague. Saying $599 Ultrabooks will appear sooner or later isn’t much of a promise, put pinning down a date is.

Speaking at IDF, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company’s new Hallway tablet platform will “go below $100 by Q4 2013” and to be honest we are not sure we believe in Intel election promises anymore. There are practically no big brand Android tablets with anything close to that pricing at the moment.

There are however plenty of white-box tablets priced at $99 or less, but most of them are rubbish, as they feature antiquated chipsets, low resolution screens and simply don’t have a lot going for them. It is relatively easy to come up with interesting products in the $130 to $180 range, but going down to sub-$100 isn’t as easy. A quick glance at the BOM of low end tablets reveals that there’s really not much room to cut corners and pinch pennies without seriously compromising the product, but let’s leave the geeky details out of this. Even if it practically gives away Bay Trail parts at cost, it is highly unlikely that hardware makers can come up with compelling designs at $99 or less.

The other problem with Intel’s promise is that it sounds pointless on another level. Chasing others to the bottom doesn’t really sound like something the world’s leading chipmaker should be doing, unless it considers MediaTek, Rockchip, Allwinner and other low-cost SoC makers as direct competitors. It just looks bad and if some partners really come up with dirt cheap Intel based tablets they will just hurt Intel’s brand, because they are bound to be terrible. With today’s component prices, the only way Intel could come up with truly good sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year is if it subsidizes them, quite heavily. However, that would cost plenty of money and it would not address the primary concern – what on earth is Intel doing in that market segment to begin with?

Acer’s Shih declares doom for Wintel alliance

Posted on September 10, 2013 by - News

shihceAcer founder Stan Shih has turned on the Microsoft-Intel alliance, claiming that its PC empire will eventually fail because management is too greedy.

Speaking at a Taipei media conference, Shih said Wintel is doomed because both Microsoft and Intel keep too high a share of the profits for themselves, leading other players towards emerging rivals like Google’s ecosystem.

Shih claimed the Wintel alliance is no longer profitable for partners, and IT players are increasingly turning elsewhere. He said it wasn’t Google’s open platform driving companies to its ecosystem, suggesting instead it was a systemic flaw with Microsoft and Intel themselves.

He compared Google’s platform to Linux. Although the latter is open, it has not been driving similar adoption rates. The key here is profit, which Google understands.

For Taiwan’s technology sector, Shih believes that more investment needs to go into arts, software and technologies, to keep one of the country’s top economic drivers healthy.

Microsoft’s Nokia buy could have been the correct choice, Shih added, as long as the deal leads to value for companies, shareholders, consumers and partners. He refused to comment on rumours that Acer may be for sale, although earlier he admitted he’s neutral about the idea, Digitimes reports.

Intel runs out of roadmaps

Posted on September 3, 2013 by - News, Opinions

stapThere was a time, some years ago, when Intel mattered. It doesn’t matter any more at all and it is running out of steam.

Soon, Intel will hold its annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF) – it was a must attend event back in the days when the company had many very talented senior executives. Most of them are goners now.  Intel was famous for inventing things and driving the industry by using its considerable clout to create stuff.

Now it creates nothing, nothing at all.  Like many a large corporation, including Microsoft and many another corp too, it started behaving like an ingrowing toenail, believing – against all the evidence – that it would hold its mighty market share forever.

We did warn Intel repeatedly it shouldn’t rest on its laurels.  When it adopted StrongARM, as a result of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) maneuvers, we advised it that it should drastically change its business model and produce some stunning and cheap devices based on that technology.

But no. Like an ignorant bull, it insisted that the world+dog should have notebooks that cost a small fortune.

The last two years has seen its strategy crumble into dust. No one cares about its roadmaps any more. No one gives a flying fart about its process technology. No one has a clue.  It lost some of its most talented individuals – Kicking Pat Gelsinger, Mike Fister full of dollars, Mike Splinter and the rest, and blithely pursued a path which will lead it to Carey Street, if it’s not careful.

As we reported a week or two back, the freshly minted CEO is attempting to introduce a top down page and firing all the spin doctors who, these days, couldn’t spin their way out of a paper bag, nor organise a piss up in a brewery or cheese factory.

Like many an old dinosaur, its tiny brain doesn’t realise that it has been dying from the tail up for several years. It is a shame – we have the utmost respect for any company that has factories – this is no trivial matter. But engineering its way out of this current crisis is, we feel, a fab too far to go.

PC slump may actually benefit AMD in long run

Posted on August 29, 2013 by - Opinions

AMD, SunnyvaleIt is often said that a crisis is merely an opportunity in disguise. It is often said but it’s rarely true. However, the steep drop in PC shipments could in fact be good news for AMD.

Ten years ago AMD taught Intel a costly lesson in the high end, forcing Intel to regain its footing and invest heavily in R&D and manufacturing. As a result Intel squeezed AMD out of the high-end consumer CPU market, relegating it to the mid range and low end.

AMD wasted its opportunity, but eventually it picked up ATI a couple of years after its CPU design peaked. Things looked bright for a moment, just before they went terribly wrong. AMD suffered from poor execution and its high end chips just weren’t good enough to keep up with Intel. The K8 glory days are long gone and AMD is now a different company, it is fabless, but it also has plenty of IP, competitive graphics and very interesting APU and x86 SoC designs.

So how could the weak PC market benefit AMD, especially now that mobile chips are the new black, and AMD hasn’t got any?

Long upgrade cycles are one indicator that the era of “good enough” computing is already here. The average PC is more than four years old, few people need costly high end processors and attention is shifting to low end and mid range silicon. This is what AMD is becoming good at. Its new Jaguar based APUs are brilliant and they are superior to Intel’s current generation of Atoms. Richland based APUs aren’t as competitive, but they offer relatively good value for money and they are making inroads in the ULV market as well. The bad news is that AMD is still suffering from execution problems. Kaveri was supposed to replace Richland later this year, but it has been pushed back to early 2014, along with desktop Jaguar-based Kabini parts. AMD’s propensity for delays makes any forecast extremely difficult.

With very little need for Intel’s high-end x86 chips in the consumer market, gamers and professionals aren’t enough. This is an obvious opportunity for AMD and CEO Rory Read seems to get it. That might explain why AMD is focusing its efforts elsewhere. APUs are just part of the story, they were the logical next step in CPU evolution. AMD’s next big thing is custom chip design. The Xbox One and PS4 are based on Jaguar, with AMD graphics in tow. Now for some geeky figures.

Most people associate Jaguar with cheap and small APUs, but custom console SoCs are neither. Built using TSMC’s 28nm process, the SoC used in the Xbox One actually features eight Jaguar CPU cores, coupled with powerful graphics and plenty of SRAM embedded on the die. They pack around 5 billion transistors, while Intel’s mid-range Haswells are said to feature between 1.4 billion and 1.2 billion, depending on the SKU.

AMD hasn’t forgotten how to do huge, immensely complex chips – it’s just not doing big x86 cores anymore. Its high-end GPUs also have upwards of 4 billion transistors. What’s more, AMD can apply the same custom approach to server parts and it’s also working on ARM based server chips as well. This flexible, modular approach sounds very interesting indeed, but it’s still too early to say whether AMD will put it to good use in server chips, so to speak,  whether it will manage to find enough customers for custom parts, as the orders have to be relatively big to justify the expense of developing and producing such chips.

As far as AMD’s graphics business goes, it is doing rather well at the moment. Time and again AMD has proven that it can go toe to toe with Nvidia and win a few rounds. We’ve been looking at a virtual stalemate for the past five years. This year AMD managed to increase its GPU market share, despite the fact that Nvidia won nearly all Haswell notebook design wins. The trouble for Nvidia is that notebook graphics are a dying market. In the consumer space AMD is doing well, while Nvidia still maintains a big lead in high-margin professional graphics. The recent console wins should also help AMD’s consumer GPU business, as developers should find it easier to optimise their games for AMD’s architecture on three different platforms.

The big question is mobile. A couple of months ago Nvidia announced that it would license its Kepler GPU and future GPU IP to third-party ARM SoC builders. AMD has not made the same commitment, but some AMD graphics tech is already used in mobile chips, in the form of Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics. The ARM SoC business will continue to grow and we are bound to see more consolidation. Nvidia has a small presence in the ARM SoC market and if it is willing to license its technology to its own competitors, AMD could and should enter the market as well. It is worth noting that Adreno is running out of steam, as it is based on old AMD/ATI tech. We’re not sure it would make financial sense for Qualcomm to continue development in-house, it might reach out to AMD instead. There is very little overlap between Qualcomm and AMD at the moment, and such a marriage of convenience would make perfect sense. If that happens, AMD could end up with a huge market share in ARM SoC graphics, trumping Nvidia, ARM and Imagination.

AMD is still in a world of trouble, but looking ahead it might actually be in a better position to weather the storm than Intel, at least in the consumer space. High end chips and server parts are still Intel’s turf, although AMD could score some custom server wins in the future. Intel is pushing mobile now and it has a good chance of penetrating the market a couple of years from now, but in reality if AMD starts licensing GPU IP to the likes of Qualcomm, it could make heaps of cash in mobile, with a lot less investment and risk than Intel.

AMD Jaguar products still thin on ground

Posted on August 23, 2013 by - News, Products

jaguar-peltIn late May AMD officially launched its first Jaguar-based APUs. Kabini was supposed to end up in all sorts of products, from cheap and cheerful notebooks, to AIOs and traditional desktops.

Temash is an even more frugal version of the chip, so it was intended for ultraportables, hybrids and similar form factors. Both chips arrived with much fanfare and got a lot of praise from the tech press. They are the most interesting consumer products to come out of AMD in 2013.

However, it’s been exactly three months since the launch and there really aren’t that many actual products to buy. There are some Jaguar-based notebooks and desktops in EMEA and US, but even they are available in a handful of shops, in rather limited numbers. The Acer Aspire V5, HP Pavilion Sleekbook TouchSmart 11, Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite are Temash powered ultraportables and they are readily available in most European markets, albeit in a limited number of shops. So far they appear to be the only Temash notebooks in stock in Europe.

It is even worse with Kabini. There’s the Lenovo Thinkpad E145 in two SKUs, Toshiba Satellite C70/C75 and a huge Packard Bell 17-incher, which is practically the only Kabini notebook available on the continent, at least the only one to be found in price search engines. It’s only available in two Austrian shops, which is still better than the Lenovo and Toshiba, as nobody appears to have them in stock at the moment.

Then there’s a couple of Acer SFF desktops and a Packard Bell all-in-one, and that’s about it. There’s also not a single mini-ITX board yet, which is bad news for HTPC enthusiasts and tinkerers. It also may indicate that the first batches of Kabini chips are destined solely for OEMs, but we can only speculate.

In any case three months into the launch AMD’s most promising chip of the year is very hard to come by. This is very bad news for AMD. Kabini had the potential to wipe the floor with Intel’s obsolete 32nm Atoms and it should have enjoyed a few months on the market before Intel rolls out new 22nm Bay Trail parts. Now it seems this won’t be the case. The Bay Trail launch is just a few weeks away and it is becoming apparent that AMD failed to capitalize on its lead.

AMD informed us that is has product in stock in the US and EMEA. However, volumes and the number of actual design wins remain a concern. Jaguar is an excellent product with lots of potential, but with the PC market in shambles, it might struggle to gain traction and get plenty of design wins, as vendors and disties are still sitting on heaps of unsold Cedarview and Brazos products.