Although an earthquake ripped through Taiwan nearly a month ago, computer makers will feel the effect at least through the end of the year, analysts said today.

The latest aftershock from the deadly September 21 quake occurred yesterday when Dell Computer lowered earnings expectations for its third fiscal quarter because of another surge in memory prices. The hike has added nearly $75 to the manufacturing cost of roughly one-third of all Dell computers, the company said. In addition, the Dell said it would start packing its PCs with less memory in an effort to cut costs.

Component supplies and prices are already edging back to normal, industry observers have said, but the current situation will likely dent sales and profits at major PC companies through the end of the year. Further, some cost-cutting moves could come back to haunt manufacturers as the public has become accustomed to luxurious amounts of memory.

"Putting less memory on every box could turn out to backfire on them," said Dan Niles, an analyst at BancBoston Robertson Stephens, who indicated he would likely lower already lowered estimates as a result of yesterday's announcement. "Given that we are going to Windows 2000, if you are putting 64MB in the box, there are a lot of IT managers who are going to want providers who are providing 128MB."

Sources outside Intel have now supplied us with many more details about the Outrigger (OR840) mobo which is Intel's contribution to the i840 party and which supports the famous Coppermine products which the company will introduce next Monday. Err...we didn't get them from Mr Murthi. The OR840 has support for both AGP 4X and AGP Pro 5, and has four RIMM sockets which will support up to 2Gb of Rambus memory. These Rambus slots support both ECC and non-ECC direct RDRAM at speeds of 600/800MHz, and take 64Mb, 128Mb, 256Mb and 512Mb. As far as we know, the 512Mb modules, however, are not shipping yet. The board supports dual Pentium IIIs of 533MHz and above, using the 133MHz system bus, as we revealed earlier, and has five PCI slots as well as supporting Ultra ATA/66 IDE. This last Intel terms as an Xcelerator, it supports two independent channels for four IDE devices and includes DMA-66 and CD Rom support. AGP Pro 50 (5.0) is of some interest. This spec runs at data transfer rates of 266MHz and Intel claims it will achieve data throughput rates of up to 1Gbps. It has a dedicated AGP Pro 50 slot which is backwards compatible to AGP 4x. The 50 referes to 50 watts maximum power consumption and it has the same data transfer rate as AGP4x. AGP 2x, 4x and AGP Pro all use a 32 bit bus. When quad pumped, that amounts to 1056Mbps, 528Mbps when dual pumped.

Intel knows in its heart that Coppermine just can't cut it in the race against Athlon, so Chipzilla has a little surprise up its sleeve - the next generation of IA32 processor, codenamed Willamette, could be here a staggering nine months early. US sources say the chip will have a paper launch at the end of December, with product in the shops two months later, although if AMD keeps up the pressure it could be even sooner. Presumably this two month gap is to enable OEMs to shift bucketloads of Coppermine systems before they're rendered unsaleable by the new super chip. Coppermine arrives next week, but still uses the venerable P6 core that first saw the light of day in the Pentium Pro, albeit at a dinky 0.18 micron process, coupled with on die level 2 cache. It'll be faster than existing Pentium IIIs, but not earth-shatteringly so. Now with Athlon starting to win the hearts and minds battle, and still wincing from the Camino chipset cockup, the chip behemoth - still smarting from Chimpzilla's new found ability to deliver silicon rather than hot air - desperately needs to do something impressive - and fast. Intel's been quietly shipping 0.18 micron mobile processors for the best part of six months, but even so, bringing Willamette so far forward is pretty impressive stuff. The entirely new 0.18 micron Willamette was originally scheduled to arrive around Q3 2000 at 1100MHz with more than 1MB integrated level 2 cache and Intel performance estimates say it will score around 50 on Winstone98 and 43 on SpecInt95.