Ouch! I wonder how this effects Nvidia, and AMD it would seem that it
would encourage their use; especially since VIA, SIS do not have chips
on hand.
Could help them out, particularly in the short-term. Long-term is
much harder to predict.
It also brings up another issue, is the smithfield core doing that
good, or is demand for that chip so strong as to hamper supply. Maybe
Dell is selling a lot of dual core chips now, and is taking up the
supply.
It could be, though I haven't seen much indication that dual-core P4
chips are doing much better than any other new chip introduction. If
you look at Dell they don't even offer the Pentium D on most of their
systems. Only a handful of their newest systems (2 home systems, 1
office system and 1 workstation) offer the chip. The story with HPaq
is about the same, and in fact HP offers AMD's dual-core chips on just
as many systems as they do for Intel's dual-core chips.
I certainly don't have any hard numbers to back this up one way or
another, and I certainly don't think that the Pentium D is doing
particularly badly. However I do try and keep my ear to the ground on
this sort of thing, and I haven't seen anything that looks like a
shortage of Pentium D chips. It's also not like Intel could shift fab
space from the production of chipsets to the production of the Pentium
D given that they are produced on a different manufacturing process
(130nm or 180nm for chipsets, 90nm for processors).