The Taiwanese mainboard makers say that the demand for mainboards supporting Athlon XP, Athlon and Duron processors has got considerably bigger recently. This tendency gets reflected in the growing orders from the European market, where AMD’s positions are traditionally better than in the States. The growing number of orders is first of all caused by better sales volume in the retail sector.

The mainboard makers also predict that the described above tendency will continue throughout August as well. At the same time, we wouldn’t state that the popularity of Socket A platforms is growing up. Most OEM orders are still for Pentium 4 and Pentium III platforms, which leaves only 20% to the Socket A, as the mainboard guys estimate. And the shipments of solutions for Intel Pentium 4 CPUs makes now over 50%.

The growing demand in Europe, which we have been witnessing all July and even now, can be explained by the end of the vacation season and the coming autumn upsurge in the market. In this respect the leading European OEM companies, such as Medion or Fujitsu Siemens Computers ordered more mainboards and graphics cards from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI.

However, to a really great disappointment of the mainboard makers, this tendency seems not to work in the North and South America, which these are the countries where they basically sell most their products. Therefore, the Taiwanese manufacturers still do not expect the shipment volumes to grow up that much in Q3.