IT IS NOW clear that there are just not enough Athlon 64/FX CPUs around, as we reported from Computex. And that explains why there aren't too many motherboards around for them either. It seems that AMD will not ship too many of these CPUs this year as it simply can not make some decent quantities. We just learned that motherboard reviews are not an ATI priority at this time and that AMD only wants boxed systems to be reviewed.
Even though you can buy Athlon 64 3200+ both in UK and Austria there are no too many boards in the shops to plug them in. Some of the Tottenham Court Road computer shops have them but in many shops you have to preorder the board if you want 64 marchitecture on your desktop. We understand, as we have reported before, that the real expansion of Athlon 64 and FX boards will come in Q1 2004 at the time when AMD will be able to ship more CPUs.
So real expansion of Nvidia's, VIA's, SIS and ALI solutions is yet to come, later on in Q1 2004 and by that time all of these motherboard and chipset vendors want to be Prescott ready.
News source: The Inq
