AMD's Barcelona Chips Hit the Shelves in Eight Distinct Models

Chip manufacturer Advanced micro Devices has just announced public availability of its Barcelona quad-core server processors. The chips have finally arrived at the local retailers, after six months of continual delays because of the crippling TLB erratum bug affecting its silicon.

"We're off to the races now, and the product is out," said John Fruehe, worldwide market development manager at AMD. "All of the fixes are in place, and everything looks wonderful," he continued.

The Barcelona chips have officially been introduced in September last year, but right after they got unveiled, the manufacturer noticed that the chip was affected by numerous bugs in its silicon. AMD decided to pull the chips off the distribution circuit.

At the moment, it seemed the right decision, that saved the company from users complaining about their servers. At the same time, AMD lost an incredibly large market share in favor of Intel and even Sun.

AMD today announced eight different OEM platforms built around the reborn Opteron chips. As expected, one of the first supporters was server manufacturer Hewlett-Packard that pre-announced its Barcelona server line-up quite a while ago.

According to Randy Allen, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's server and workstation business, HP will introduce its Opteron-based servers to meet the customers' demand in the "unique" Direct Connect Architecture with innovative design.

"HP has experienced unparalleled success over the past four years in bringing AMD Opteron processor-based platforms to commercial customers of all sizes," said Allen.

Hewlett-Packard will bundle the Barcelona processors with some of its ProLiant G5 family of servers, that will be primarily used for virtualization on the corporate and enterprise markets. The first servers to emerge on the market will be the HP ProLiant DL385 G5 and the ProLiant BL685c G5.