#9 and #17, Ed has in the past shown such a blind bias towards intel that I would not even ask him the time of day, fearing he would somehow put a spin on that. He may have changed since then, but based on past writings I have a hard time believing that any opinion pieces from overclockers.com could present a valid point of view. Same goes for amdzone.com at the other end of the spectrum. With that aside...

This may sound like AMD biting, no, chewing off the hands that used to feed it, but it's nothing more than the result of cold, hard business decisions from a corporate entity that has no soul (whether it should or not is an entirely different discussion). AMD obviously pushed for more customers than they could actually supply, and now they are going to lose some of them because manufacturing could not keep up with marketing/sales. A classic case of biting off more than they could chew. So they had to pick between bad and worse, and made the more logical and (hopefully for AMD) ultimately profitable choice of satisfying large customers first. Ho-hum, business as usual.

An overclockers.com write-up is dead on regarding this one:
http://www.overclockers.com/tips01058

This is business. AMD would have been stupid to pass up a deal with Dell, and they'd be stupid again to screw up the deal after it's done to satisfy a much less predictable channel.

This just reinforces some already know facts:
1. AMD needs to get its additional fab space up and running ASAP
2. AMD needs to get 65-nano going ASAP
3. Points 1 & 2 don't play nice together

The good news is that AMD is selling every processor it can make. The bad news is that AMD isn't able to make enough processors. More good news is that the Dell deal is great news for consumers and Intels hegemony is further weakend.

Wow....just like most everyone thought. Once Dell went with AMD.....AMD would not be able to keep up. Steve Jobs is probably saying "I told you so".

Unfortunately for AMD it’s the cheap/low end CPU’s that are in high demand. The Core 2 is the CPU of choice once you get past the cheap stuff.

AMD better hurry up before Intel ramps its Core 2 up to full speed and starts offering "Celeron" versions of the Core 2 stuff.

#16 Find me one with raid support. I'm actually looking into upgrading my system. I mean I'm willing to spend the 200 on a board, I'm just curious if there are cheaper ones available (has to be able to overclock)

The difference in motherboards between AM2 and C2D is huge atm. Every $80 AM2 MB has raid, PCI-E, DDR2-800 support, many are even overclocking friendly, there are $120 dollar boards with SLI.

Its not just the price of the CPU either. I could get an AM2 motherboard with raid and DDR2-800 support with PCI-E for like 80 dollars. To get an intel board with the same features I would have to pay like 170. An 80 dollar intel board that supports conroe will come with DDR400 support and AGP! Having said that, I will probably be upgrading to Conroe soon. I'm just saying that if you factor motherboard costs and don't overclock, AMD probably beats intel in everything except a few game titles such as FAR CRY. If you overclock though, as I will be, it is really no contest, as nothing AMD has can compete with a 2.8-3.2 Ghz conroe. For many enthusiasts this is all they look at, but we have to remember that most people don't overclock...

even if dell is a big customer, amd better get it's supply chain straightened out. This is not good. Its hopefully going to get better once the 65 nm process is up and running.

Seems like it is some CPUs that are in short supply rather than their whole inventory.
But I just did a quick check at NCIX online store and saw in stock (e.g. over 50 in stock of X2-4200+ AM2) just about all the X2s (for both S939 and AM2).
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?majorcatid=101&minorcatid=106

This doesn't come as a big surprise, after all, Dell is one hungry pig!

Duh! Captain Obivious to the rescue!