AMD has supply shortages

AMD has officially admitted that it is facing supply shortages of its Athlon chips.

Commentators long suspected that one of the reasons Dell was not supplying AMD machines was that AMD would not be able to produce enough chips to satisfy the PC giant.

However, now the reverse appears to be true - Dell says it has plenty of chips, whilst everyone else is going hungry.

"The one thing we would have made sure of with AMD is that they could adhere to our demand. We haven't seen any significant issues in terms of supply. It's been very finely managed," said Adam Griffin, channel marketing executive at Dell, according to PCPro.

However, others are having problems, says the Inquirer. "We received e-mails from distributors spreaded across the globe that AMD cannot supply them with enough dual-core CPUs ordered by computer assembly stores."

Well, AMD has come out today and admitted that there are shortages, but that they are entirely mundane. According to CRN, "AMD acknowledged the shortage but declined to discuss its allocation guidelines or channel strategy. A spokesman attributed the problem to a strain on supply as overall demand increases from both system builders and top OEMs."

So, if you're trying to get hold of an AMD chip, there could be wait times ahead. AMD doesn't have anywhere near the manufacturing capacity of Intel, which positively dwarves the green team when it comes to raw numerical output.

Let us know your thoughts on the AMD / Dell hookup, and your experiences of buying AMD chips recently, over in the forums.