14 DAY TRIAL // Initially announced to become publicly available during the first quarter of 2008, Intel's Core 2 Quad ?Yorkfield? processors do exist on the market, but in scarce quantities only. Most of the e-tailers have received the units, yet most of them have no units in stock.
The chips seem to be running late, as there are only a few days until the industry officially moves to the second quarter. Last month, Intel claimed that the Q9550, Q9450, and Q9300 were facing increased demand on the market, and the company would deliver more and more units as production ramps up.
For instance, when checking with the e-tailers, (as Intel advises) users can notice that the pre-ordered number of Yorkfield units easily overpasses the estimated processors to be received at an indefinite date in the future.
UK-based retailer OcUK, for instance, lists "10+" units of the Q9450 chip as available and ready to ship. The faster Q9550 part, running at 2.83GHz with 12MB of L2 cache is not to be found anywhere.
Despite the "tight" situation, Intel keeps claiming that a huge number of units is about to invade the markets, just as it stated a few weeks ago. On the other side, the 45-nanometer Harpertown-based Xeon processors for servers are widely available in both Xeon 5410 and 5430 (2.33GHz and 2.67GHz) flavors.
The processor manufacturer seems to have decided to saturate the server market first, because it is there where the big money comes from, then to take care of the desktop users. This seems to be a bad decision, because the Yorkfield chips are in huge demand and upgrades are currently paralyzed by the processors' absence.
Intel is currently working its way to free up production capacity in its partner fabs in order to ramp up production of its 45-nanometer desktop quad-core chips. However, this is an operation that takes time, and the Q-series of chips might get delayed a few days or a few weeks as well.