14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the issues with Intel's chipset won't affect HP as much as it feared, as the company has increased its notebook orders for the second quarter while shifting orders between manufacturers.
End-users may be aware of a fairly unfortunate occurrence on the PC market, that being the flaw related to Intel's 6-series chipsets.
For those in need of a reminder or just didn't know, the Cougar Point had a design flaw that led to the deterioration of SATA 3.0 Gbps ports.
Following the discovery, all of Intel's partners stopped shipping motherboards and notebooks based on the platform, pending shipment of the fixed versions (the one based on the B3 stepping).
Given that shipments have since started, some companies that had reduced their orders for the next quarter had a cause to regain some of their optimism.
HP is revealed to be among them, as it has placed a shipment forecast, for March at least, of just 3.8-3.9 million units.
The numbers have been pushed up to 4.2 million-4.3 million while notebook suppliers saw their orders shifting between one another.
Quanta, for instance, will be supplying 800,000-1.2 million HP machines in the following quarter, although it will still handle 1.9-2 million of the ones scheduled for March (last month of Q1).
Meanwhile, Foxconn will have to raise its monthly capacity at its inland plants to 350,000-400,000 units for March.
For the second quarter, it will actually get double the orders from HP, meaning a volume of f 0.8-1.5 million (for both the Chongqing and Kunshin, China plants).
Given the actual vacuum of current-generation notebooks and motherboards that Intel's mishap left the market with, the sooner everyone recovers from it the better, especially seeing as how AMD doesn't yet have hardware capable of filling in for the higher-end Sandy bridge CPUs.