No AMDs allowed in Holy Land

[Alpine]

SEASONED INQ readers will know that Intel - and the INQUIRER for that matter - have a very strong presence in Israel.


Intel's Centrino chip design team is based in that very land, and the very first design centre outside of the US was set up in Haifa in 1974.

Despite the history, Israeli system builders and consumers are clamouring for Athlon 64 CPUs - not unreasonably, we might add - but trying to get hold of one appears to be harder than finding a man with dry eyes at a bris.

A source of ours over in that land tells us the story of the only official AMD importer in Israel, Aztek, which decided to stop importing AMD's chips. AMD switched its official business over to the mighty distributor Tech Data, but it is only carrying Semprons and Athlon XPs.

The company line, according to our source, is that it doesn't have the special import clearance from US authorities to bring Athlon 64 chips into the country.

Israeli hardware websites appear to have a dearth of samples [No different from over here then, Ed.] and the only A64s that find themselves in the market are grey imports. We contacted AMD about this story for verification but everyone was unavailable for comment and huddled in a meeting. Our INQ Israel correspondent, Paul Hales, tells us that when he was over there last visiting his wife in Jerusalem, he had to build a Prescott based system because of the lack of available components.




Source:

The INQ!