EETimes heeft een artikel in elkaar gedraaid met concrete info over de gevolgen van de aardbeving in Taiwan voor AMD en Athlon moederplank fabrikanten:
The first big tangible fallout from the tragedy hit Advanced Micro Devices: Two out of three of AMD's Taiwan board makers, who were rushing to build boards for AMD's Pentium III-killer Athlon processor, are out of action.GVC and Microstar have halted production of their Athlon boards in the aftermath of the quake. First International Computer is running at about 60 percent capacity at a Taipei plant, the only one currently making the Athlon boards, said Tom Chang, director of marketing for FIC in Fremont, Calif.
"As of right now it looks like it is only FIC. The others say they will be two or three weeks away from shipping again," said Doug Massa, a channel marketing manager for AMD in Sunnyvale. "This is definitely a speed bump for us. It was an unforeseen problem."
Before the quake, AMD sent a number of engineers to Taiwan to help other motherboard makers including Acer and Asustek ramp up boards that use the fast CPU in hopes a number of other boards will ship by the end of the year. However, the complex design has slowed the pace of uptake, said a senior engineer at NEC's PC group who asked not to be named.
"Athlon is definitely a challenge that has a lot of people burning the midnight oil right now, in part because it uses a fast 200 MHz front side bus," the engineer said. "Also AMD has not yet been able to get out boards that support two-way processors. That would really be competitive against the Intel Xeon line."
