[Alpine]

All Rhodes lead to Merom

IT'S A common misconception that there's a wild love affair between vendors, distributors and resellers. In public, copious amounts of cascading Cristal champagne, endless gongs and exotic locations serve to foster that view.

But to everyone in the industry it's an open secret that many distributors distrust vendors, vendors view distributors with disdain, and resellers can be found occasionly foaming at the mouth and chewing rushes like good King John, as they watch their sales and margins shrinking.

So it is with some interest that we notice in Digitimes that AMD is holding a distributor jamboree in Dubai, while Intel APAC will schmooze disties and top partners at a gig in Sanya, Hainan Province China at month end too.

Intel has just finished a gig in Greek island Rhodes where Gordon Graylish schmoozed the resellers with talk of Conroe and Merom to come. But behind the scenes all we hear from resellers and tier two and three system integrators are grumbles about the two X86 vendors.

In Intel's case they're cheesed off because after ending rebates last June, as reported in the INQ, they've been rebating, rebating and rebating again this year in order to shift stock for the introduction of the new lamps that will change its fortunes.

In AMD's case, some system integrators we've talked to have had to resort to all sorts of tactics in order to get the chips they need when they need them because of a shortage of the ones they want. However, place an independently minded hack anywhere near vendors, distributors and resellers having verbal intercourse, and you'll see them all behaving as if the channel was a veritable paradise and Intel and AMD are archangels. They've all got hack detectors fitted but the nice thing is that disties and resellers can remove theirs and chat to you off the record about the thorns, rather than the sweet smelling roses that adorn the public face of the channel.

The INQuirer