Chas, I can't see who is doing the ordering, as the boxmakers aren't selling any boxes and, supposedly, they are trying to lessen the glut in the channel, not increase it. The latter statement is the one I question, as CPQ, IBM and co. have long claimed to be cutting channel inventories while they were stuffing them more. That may be what is going on. Of course, we could have had a lot of orders, very temporarily, due to the planned shutdowns in Asia.
One thing I know for certain: if there were real increases in demands, those fabs wouldn't be going on a vacation for ten days.
BTW, the 66-68 MB only lasts as long as DRAM goes down in price. MSFT has already said that Win 98 maxes out at 32 MB. Sure, you can add more to impress the gullible when it is cheap, but when prices go up, and you cannot raise or even hold the prices of your boxes, that game disappears.
Intel's pricing is a non-event. The Celery is simply not as good as the AMD and Cyrix chips. And the PII had to drop in price to sell any high end boxes at all.
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