Sure enough, on 25 October last year, to the applause of Wall Street and to a fanfare of applause from the said Cassandras and the Dad's Army of obedient Hackdom, Intel announced a whole spate of Coppermine cores.

What a difference a day makes. On the 26th of October last year, Intel quietly sent its PC customers and its distributors a little memorandum which spelt out the unfortunate fact that even though it had announced CuMines, there was going to be something of a long delay in delivering these parts in quantity.

How to Piss Off the Channel
Let's face it, distributors and dealers easily get cheesed off with their suppliers, which makes them such a great source of news for IT journalists.

In January this year, we had occasion to meet with one of the bigger European distributors of microprocessors - and one, moreover, which distributed both AMD and Intel chips.

He told us a sad and sorry tale of how Intel had placed its boxed microprocessors on allocation not for weeks, but for months.

Although INTC business had previously been good, indeed very good business, he alleged that shortages and tightness in supply had meant that the "good earner" had stopped being the cash cow and gravy train it was, and that, like it or not, AMD was promising and delivering good supply. His company therefore had no option to deliver AMD chips to those dealers who would accept them. At this stage, quite a few dealers were still Intel-only houses.

But, over the next four months, we heard from members of Intel's dealer channel of undeliverable orders from Chipzilla and a subsequent move to the opposition in the shape of AMD.