Charles Chou, an analyst at Fubon Securities, commented that the tight supply of low-end Intel Celeron and AMD Socket AM2 Sempron CPUs became apparent in the middle of September, with the two chip vendors gearing up to accelerate each platform"s transition by the fourth quarter of 2006. Consequently, despite a traditional peak in seasonal effects, Chou expressed an uncertain outlook for motherboard shipments in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Taiwan"s major motherboard makers — Asustek Computer, Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS), Gigabyte Technology, and Micro-Star International (MSI) — may have shipped a combined total of 30.06 million motherboards in the third quarter, up 18% from 25.48 million units in the second quarter, Chou estimates.