These chips are not cheap, the 6700K sells for $350 and 6600K is $243 so the fact that people want them should be fondling Intel’s bottom line at the moment. The only problem is that Intel cant get them into the shops.

Readers have been telling us that major online retailers occasionally get them but they go out of stock very fast.

Motley Fool thinks that it has found a reason. Chipzilla’s Bill Holt showed a following slide illustrating the relative health of Skylake’s company's 14-nanometer technology with respect to the prior-generation 22-nanometer technology:

He intended to show that 14-nanometer yields are close to 22-nanometer product yields, but Motley Fool claims that for most of Intel's 14-nanometer products -- particularly those aimed at thin and light notebooks -- yields are still lower than they are for the comparable 22-nanometer parts.

There are plenty of cheap and cheerful quad core Skylake-based Core i5 desktop processors in stock as well as still lower-performance dual core Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron processors. But the high end shortage suggests that Intel is facing some not-so-pleasant issues in manufacturing chips that can meet the stringent power/performance requirements demanded by these processors.

Apparently Intel's woes are due to the aggressive metal pitch scaling that the company aimed for relative to the 22-nanometer node.

Intel claimed that a "normal" scaling generation-to-generation of the minimum metal pitch of a process technology is usually by a factor of 0.7 times. With the 14-nanometer node, Intel chose to be more aggressive and aimed for a scaling factor of 0.65 times.

This meant that there should have been better cost per transistor. But when yields wind up worse than expected and the products are designed with transistor counts assuming equivalent yields, product costs can suffer.

So the yield problems hurt the chips’ functionality and the kinds of performance/power a chip can hit.