What just happened? In a post-earnings call with industry analysts last week, Dell's COO Jeffrey Clarke warned that the company's PC business for commercial and premium consumers was affected by CPU supply shortages at Intel's end, and as a result, it would have to lower its revenue forecast for 2019.

Intel's been in a tough spot lately, and things seem unlikely to improve for the company anytime soon. On the one hand, there's the business of selling CPUs, which is currently being dominated by AMD Ryzen chips in the US, while a majority of surveyed European consumers showed their preference for AMD over Chipzilla for their next desktop CPU.

On the supplying side, Intel is finding it difficult to meet the demand for its 14nm chips and is reportedly looking at third-party suppliers to pick up the slack. The crisis is also affecting Intel's partners, including Dell, the third-largest PC maker in the world, which had to lower its revenue forecast for 2019.

"Intel CPU shortages have worsened quarter-over-quarter the shortages are now impacting our commercial PC and premium consumer PC Q4 forecasted shipments," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke in a recent call with Wall Street analysts over the company's Q3 earnings.

Despite ongoing problems with Intel, Q3 figures for Dell's PC business rose by 4.6 percent to $11.41 billion, taking the total quarterly revenue to $22.84 billion, reports Reuters. However, the company cut its FY2020 revenue forecast down from between $92.7 billion and $94.2 billion to between $91.5 billion and $92.2 billion.