Intel was apparently too optimistic in regards rapid transition to the i865-sereis platforms from i845-series solutions. As Taiwanese mainboard manufacturers indicated, share of Springdale platforms in their shipments is about 10-15%, whereas Intel expected the share to account for 20%.

DigiTimes reports that i865 chipset accounted for 10-15% of ASUS’ June shipments, less than 10% of Micro-star International’s (MSI) and 15% of Gigabyte Technology’s. Furthermore, the share is not expected to increase significantly this month as well.

There is no information about the reason of such moderate acceptance of the new chipsets, but in general their pricing should be blamed in addition to the mix of factors. We should also note that once low-cost i848P comes to the market, it may take longer for the dual-channel DDR SDRAM-supporting platforms to gain market acceptance because of their higher prices.

Unfortunately, Intel’s intention to rapidly uptick the share of dual-channel DDR SDRAM platforms did not succeed. Because the company is expected to launch another single-channel memory-supporting chipset, we have to say that Intel lowered the share of higher-performance platforms in its initial targets for the year.