14 DAY TRIAL // That notebook makers were going to see substantial notebook sales increase once Intel recovers from the Cougar point mishap was obvious, but it seems just how much sales will rise has finally been established, more or less.
January, and the entire first quarter so far, has not exactly been the best of times for Intel.
When it released tis new PC platform, at the start of the year, the company, along with everyone else, was sure sales would spike and keep strong.
For the first couple of weeks, the expectations seemed to be proven true, until a certain day near the end of the first month of January.
Last month, the company discovered a fairly troublesome design flaw in the 6-Series chipset, otherwise known as Cougar Point.
The problem was something that caused SATA 3.0 Gbps ports to degrade over time, eventually affecting the functionality of the products.
Practically all motherboards and notebook powered by the platform were affected, and when OEMs abruptly stopped sales, a sort of vacuum was left.
Needless to say, for all IT player involved, this implied that their monthly and quarterly shipments would be visibly lower than they expected.
Considering that the first quarter of any year is generally slower than the rest, this was doubly worrisome.
Fortunately, Intel managed to already start to send out the fixed, B3-stepping Cougar Point, meaning that new notebooks will be ready in March.
Thus, shipments of notebooks should pick up considerably next month, as confirmed by a recent report made by Digitimes.
This is actually an even more optimistic forecast than the initial one, which said orders would be delayed until April.
Compal and Wistron, for instance, are expected to see revenue increases of 30-40% and to keep growing by May.
What remains to be seen is by what percentage each maker of Intel-based products grows over the next quarter.