14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may have claimed that the hard disk drive unit shortage is responsible for its recent revision of its financial expectations for the fourth quarter of 2011, but not everyone is convinced.
Investment firm Nomura Equity Research actually believes there is much more to the lower financial expectations than meets the eye.
For those who need to quickly get up to speed, Intel recently said that it expects to make about $1 billion less during the fourth quarter of 2011 than it expected before.
Officially, it cast blame on the hard disk drive shortage, even as it means to use the opportunity to promote SSDs.
Nomura Equity Research isn't buying that, though, saying that HDD shortages are a concern, but not the only and not the greatest one either.
Weak PC and particularly ultrabook demand is seen as the more relevant issue, as well as Intel's failure to bring out a real ARM competitor.
After all, smartphone and tablet chips are, in comparison, very sought after these days.
It doesn't help that the Santa Clara, California-based company failed to impress the Chinese consumer base all that much either.
It was quite obvious that speculations on whether or not Intel really was suffering so much from the HDD shortage would arise.
Its CPUs do power most of the desktops and laptops out there, so there is no question that it will experience some slowdown from this.
Still, seeing as how Advanced Micro Devices said it didn'treally think HDD woes will affect its own operations, Nomura's suspicions about Intel's statement gain a bit more credence.
It also bears noting that CPUs advanced faster than software, games included, so there is not that great an incentive to upgrade systems, since the machines of one or two/three years ago run everything just fine.
Not only that, but DirectX 11 is the only real visual upgrade that games can need, and that is completely dependent on the graphics card, not the CPU.