The company has identified them to have errors and stopped their shipment

Dec 6, 2007 08:34 GMT  ·  By
If it were not completely missing, the processor would have surely been state-of-the-art
   If it were not completely missing, the processor would have surely been state-of-the-art

If you ever thought that things can not go worse, AMD is the exception that can confirm the rule. The more time passes, the more processors AMD discovers to suffer from the infamous TLB errata. The four-core Opteron chips are apparently available on the market, but they seem to benefit from customer-proof protection, since they are not to be found in any retailers' store. More than that, simply asking the personnel would bring you the "You're mocking me, right?" answer.

The processor has been confirmed to suffer from an erratum or bug and AMD decided that it should be fixed and patched before it goes all public. Therefore, the high-end customers need to be taken care of, while the rest of the mortals have to wait for a four-core Opteron until next year.

It is not hard to imagine that rumors of AMD having halted Opteron shipments erupted, but the company's spokespersons have denied them. "We haven't changed the shipping pattern", AMD man Phil Hughes told InternetNews. "It's only a stop ship if it's shipping in volume, and we're only shipping Barcelona for specific customer commitments, like larger volume deployments". In other words, AMD denies stopping the shipment because they do not ship them yet.

IBM has also been affected by AMD's decision of ceasing the shipment and made sure to pull out all the Opteron-based server benchmark results, since they could not deliver the systems in due time, which could upset the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). The absence from the market is annoying mostly because AMD gathered all the major vendors when they launched the line. Of course these people would have expected to be able to buy them, after all.

This should be regarded as another suicidal attempt for AMD. The company is one step closer to the precipice's edge and the Intel competition knows how to give them a nudge. Intel has just grinningly released a new division of faster and more energy-aware Xeons that will surely enjoy strong marketing in the year to come.