Advanced Micro Devices has revised an October pledge to make its new quad-core Opteron processors "widely available" by the end of the year and won"t ship large quantities to the channel until the first quarter of next year, a spokesperson for the chipmaker told ChannelWeb Wednesday. A chip-level bug, or errata, that affected both the quad-core Opterons and AMD"s recently released quad-core Phenom desktop processors was "part of the reason" for the sluggish ramp-up, said Phil Hughes of AMD Global Communications.
AMD"s president and COO Dirk Meyer said in an October earnings call that its new server chips would be "widely available by the middle of this quarter" and that the company expected "to ship hundreds of thousands of quad-core processors this quarter into the server and desktop segments." The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chipmaker is still "on track to do hundreds of thousands of quad-cores" shipped in the fourth quarter, Hughes said. However, "on the first point, that has been revised a bit," he said, referring to Meyer"s statement that the chip codenamed Barcelona would be "widely available" as of December.