The rumblings that Intel Corp has been having more problems successfully fabricating the Pentium chip than it has been prepared to discuss have erupted again, and our sister paper Unigram.X today reports that Pentium has been hit by another round of serious availability problems because of poor yields. The company has been out telling run-of-the-mill customers not to expect any serious deliveries at least until October. Until then, the limited supplies of Pentium the company can muster will be going to Intel’s best customers worldwide, a short list that is believed to include AST Research Inc, Compaq Computer Corp, Dell Computer Corp and NCR Corp. IBM Corp and Sequent Computer Systems Inc are possibly on it too – Siemens AG is is helping with the chip so Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG so may also be in the line-up. But deliveries even to these companies are expected to be severely attenuated. Sources say that Intel reckons it won’t be able to ship them more than 2,000 or 3,000 to each apiece before October, a third of what had been projected before. Most of these will likely be 60MHz Pentiums, not the 66MHz parts Intel has been shooting for. In order to forestall Pentium systems development from screeching to a halt, Intel is prepared to supply a relative handful of parts to support on-going projects. These parts may not even operate at 60MHz. Intel is believed to have altered the process it uses to fabricate the hard-to-build chips and won’t know until the autumn whether the process actually works. Intel carefully skirted the issues of Pentium’s price and delivery at its ostensible introduction last month. While the further delay is irksome, the company is still selling all the 80486 parts it can make, and that part and the 80386 each suffered comparable difficulties on their way to the market.
