Dell customers delayed at Caminogate gulch

Customers who ordered Dell Dimension XPS B systems as soon as the company made them available have been told they'll have to wait a bit longer to play with their Rambus compliant toys. A reader who placed an order for the machines, which support the Rambus memory set, and, according to the Dell web site, Pentium IIIs now up to 800MHz, is still waiting. He said: "I placed an order for a Dell XPS "B" computer on the 16th of November. That was the day after it was announced that Camino systems were available. The original ship date was suppose to be the 17 December." But, he says, Dell has now told him that shipments of the systems will not be until the second week in January, a full two months after he first placed the order. Dell has similar problems to other PC manufacturers, in that there is a shortage of Intel Coppermine processors, coupled with a dearth of RIMMs to populate i820 motherboards. According to some reports, Intel was only able to ship around 1.5 million Coppermine processors in this quarter, a fraction of the parts that the industry wanted. Yesterday Intel announced it was shipping 800MHz Pentium IIIs, but Pentium III 733MHz chips and other flavours of its .18 micron Coppermine chips are still very thin on the ground. Dell was not available for comment at press time. ® * A reader has pointed to a document on the Intel site concerning the errata in Pentium III that mispells "floating point" as "gloating point".