Oooops !!! 3 months to get the new Athlon based Micron s PC!! I am going to be obliged to buy a Pentium IV, LOL !!
Micron Glitch Delays Athlon PCs
(11/29/00, 12:52 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
If you want to purchase Micron's latest Athlon-based PC, be prepared to wait more than three months.
Micron Electronics Inc. (stock: MUEI) is reporting lead times of 98 days on a version of the Millennia XP that uses the latest AMD-760 chipset from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (stock: AMD) and its new 266-MHz front-side bus speed, together with a 1.2-GHz Athlon microprocessor.
The problem doesn't appear to be specific to any one supplier, Micron officials said Tuesday evening. Rather, the delays stem from a motherboard glitch that forced Micron to redesign the motherboard, with help from AMD and Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd., the supplier of the board itself.
When Micron launched the desktop configuration in late October, the company was already quoting lengthy lead times because of customer demand, which last week reached 56 days. Those lead times nearly doubled on Monday, when Micron finally nailed down the problem. As of Tuesday, customers ordering the delayed Millennia XP would receive the PC on Feb. 12.
By comparison, the lead time for a Millennia XP that uses a 200-MHz version of the same chipset is only five to six days, Micron officials said.
"It's largely our fault," said a spokesman for Micron, Nampa, Idaho.
When Micron first started evaluating the systems, the first AMD-760 boards used in the Millennia XP were essentially samples cobbled together by hand, the spokesman said. But when Micron started ramping volume shipments, the company found that the boards were unable to meet the noise tolerances required by the faster 266-MHz front-side bus speed used by the AMD-760 chipset. Additional hardware filters were required, and a new six-layer motherboard with improved tolerances was approved Tuesday.
Gateway Inc. (stock: GTW) also reported problems in late June concerning its own motherboards designed for the Athlon platform. However, the boards were designed by Jabil Circuit Inc. (stock: JBL), a contract manufacturer, and appear to have involved a power problem that may or may not be related to the Micron glitch.
Gateway's glitches caused the company to stop shipping the new Thunderbird Athlons with integrated cache, the same chips used in the new Millennia XP While those glitches caused errors, including the potential for a user to lose data, Micron has not reported any similar problems.
At the time of the Gateway glitch, AMD officials claimed the errors were the fault of either Gateway or its motherboard supplier.
The Micron spokesman said the company hopes the new Millennia XPs and their redesigned motherboards will allow the company to meet demand earlier than expected. As an example, he said Micron shipped a server using the Intel 840 chipset. Although lead times were initially projected at six weeks, the company shipped the server in five weeks.
The company said it hopes to be able to quickly reduce the lead times to six weeks, or about Jan. 20. However, the 98-day lead time is still the best guess, and company policy requires Micron to be conservative in its estimates, the spokesman said.
"With any new industry-leading technology you're going to run into things like this," he said.
However, the spokesman added, even with the extremely lengthy lead times, customer demand has been "quite good."
techweb.com |
