Intel's Pentium 4 nu al te koop

C|NET schrijft in dit bericht dat een kleine groep dealers in Amerika de Pentium 4 al in de schappen heeft liggen. Officieel wordt de processor pas 20 november geïntroduceerd, maar Dallas Memory International heeft bijvoorbeeld de 1,5GHz P4 voor $1.150 en de 1,4GHz versie voor $990 al op voorraad liggen. Aangezien kopers in het begin weinig plezier zullen beleven aan hun chippie (moederborden zijn er nog niet) is de verkoop op het moment wat tegenvallend; er zijn er pas 5 verkocht :

A handful of computer dealers are already selling Intel's Pentium 4 processor, which is officially slated to debut Nov. 20. Dallas Memory International, for instance, is selling the 1.5-GHz Pentium 4 for $1,150 and the 1.4-GHz version of the chip for $990, not including shipping, said Alex Zhel, a company sales representative.

However, early purchasers won't get much of an early insight into the how the chip performs. Motherboards and chipsets, which connect the processor to hard drives and other PC components, won't be available for at least another week or so, dealers said.

"You can't do anything yet," Zhel said. "We've sold about five so far."

[...] Intel has said it will produce "hundreds of thousands" of Pentium 4 chips this year, which is not many in the grand scheme of things. The company will work to ensure that the chip constitutes more than half of all of the company's microprocessor shipments by early 2002.

Although the Pentium 4 is unlikely to be an easy chip to find for a while, those selling the chip now, surprisingly, said that the current supply isn't so bad.