HP Leans on AMD and Last-Gen Intel Notebooks to Fill Gap Left by Sandy Bridge

Posted 02/09/2011 at 7:51am | by Paul Lilly

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Citing sources from upstream players, DigiTimes says Acer expects 3-4 percent of its total notebook shipments in the first quarter of 2011 will be affected by Intel's buggy 6-series chipset. Hewlett-Packard expects to be hit a little harder, noting internally that it could affect up to 6 percent of its shipments. The damage is done and there aren't many options for OEMs left holding the bag -- they can eat the loss, or shuffle around their lineup and try to make up the difference. HP is choosing the latter.

According to DigiTimes, HP has decided to increase its proportion of AMD-based notebooks versus Sandy Bridge. The OEM will also shuffle more previous generation Intel laptops into its shipment queue to absorb the hit from Sandy Bridge, which runs in the hundreds of thousands.

Meanwhile, both Acer and Asus recently announced recalls for notebooks sporting defective chips. And though Intel will spend an estimated $700 million to $1 billion replacing these chips and motherboards, it's up to the vendors to pay for shipping costs related to the recall, DigiTimes says.

OEMs can also opt to continue receiving and selling existing 6-series motherboards, so long as they agree to configure systems using only SATA ports 0/1, which are both unaffected by the bug.