As much as it’s been said that netbooks will never catch on (whether because of their small size or their relative lack of heavyweight computing power), it looks as though Intel is having some serious trouble keeping up with the demand for its Atom processors.

There’s relatively little known about the shortage of Intel’s Atom Z processors for now apart from the fact that Intel has told its customers that it won’t be taking any more orders for Atom Z processors. Digitimes is reporting that the company is “close to completely digesting its inventory,” which if nothing else communicates the gravity of the situation quite nicely.

This news can only seem worse with hardware like Nvidea’s Ion so close to launching and so entirely dependent on the Atom processor. The real question all of this raises is the burgeoning netbook market will be effected; at this stage you’d be hard pressed to find netbooks that aren’t running an Atom.

It’s a little troubling that this report comes literally the day after Intel denied rumours that there were any delays to the next generation Atom processor it’s currently working on. If both coincide there could be some very interesting things afoot in the processor market.