For the second time Taiwan-based mainboard makers express concerns about what they claim to be weak sales of Intel’s dual-core microprocessors. The companies believe that the reason for that is not low supply, but low demand for the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition as well as Intel Pentium D central processing units.

“Intel is unlikely to reach its dual-core CPU shipment goals in the second and third quarters due to weak demand, according to sources with motherboard makers,” claims a report over DigiTimes web-site.

Intel’s original target reportedly was to ship 100 thousand of dual-core processors in the second quarter and a million by the end of 2005. An earlier report suggested that the third quarter shipments of Intel Pentium D-series processors are only expected to reach 100 thousand units, whereas total shipments of dual-core desktop processors this year are projected to achieve half a million milestone, which is considerably lower than Intel originally indicated.

Mainboard makers as well as memory module manufacturers are especially concerned about slow adoption rate of Intel’s new platforms – Intel 945 and Intel 955 – as well as PC2-5300 (667MHz) memory.

Intel’s dual-core Intel Pentium D products are relatively affordable: $241, $316 or $530 – depending on the speed-bin and model – for 820 (2.80GHz), 830 (3.00GHz) or 840 (3.20GHz) chips respectively. Intel Pentium Extreme Edition processor 840 that also runs at 3.20GHz, but with HT technology enabled, costs $999 in 1000-unit quantities and is available now. Despite of the pricing, the demand for Intel Pentium D processors is low, according to mainboard makers. Unfortunately, the sources do not give any particular reasons for this, as demand is stimulated by pricing of the whole computer platform as well as performance of the whole platform.

The article says nothing about the demand and supply of AMD Athlon 64 X2 as well as AMD Opteron dual-core microprocessors.

Intel Corp.’s representatives did not comment on the news-story.