According to the analysts, the "shortage" of Pentium 4 CPUs, which has been really tangible for the last two months, should be over in the first half of January 2002, when Intel officially launches Pentium 4 with 0.13micron Northwood core (on January 7) and when the mainboards based on i845 B-Step start selling in mass (on January 1).
On our part, we would like to say that far not all the processor models were in shortage, but only Socket478 ones. It had to do with Pentium 4 1.5GHz in the first place (because of their cost) and Pentium 4 2GHz (because this was the eldest models available).
But why only Socket478 processors appeared in “shortage” and why did we put the word into inverted commas? The answer is very simple: Intel had to do something to sell out the remaining Socket423 Pentium 4 processors, which were about 3 million pieces in October :-) By January the company expects all the remaining CPUs to be sold and they will not need to hold the Socket478 pieces any more. By the way, this situation reminded us of one more interesting thing: what do you think, why did Intel ask the mainboard manufacturers to hold their i845 B-Step based solutions for a while? We don’t really know what you think about it, but we believe that the reason is just the same as in the previous case. We doubt that there could appear any manufacturer, which could make up its mind to develop an i845 B-Step based mainboard for Socket423 CPUs: it is a "dead" socket. From the very beginning...