Well handled
Back at the end of January Intel announced it was recalling all its new ‘Cougar Point' chipsets that accompanied its new ‘Sandy Bridge' processors. At the time it was assumed this would result in a major, if temporary, dip in chip sales while the matter resolved itself.
However, Intel also approached the matter pretty efficiently by publicly admitting the problem and wasting little time over the recall. While the channel was asked to shoulder much of the burden of this recall, disruption to end-users was minimal.
"This serves as a testament to Intel's capability to react to a potential crisis with speed and agility," said said Matthew Wilkins, principal analyst at iSuppli. "Intel's handling of the issue on both the public relations and business fronts stands in stark contrast to other recent examples of big companies facing major product quality challenges."
As a result, according to new figures from iSuppli, Intel's CPU (or MPU, as iSuppli insists on calling it) market share actually went up in the first quarter of this year. Intel had 82.6 percent of the market in Q1, up from the 81 percent it had in Q4 2010. AMD's share fell from 10.9 percent to 10.1 percent.
