14 DAY TRIAL // Expected to arrive at this year's Computex fair, AMD's first processors based on the Bulldozer architecture have been pushed back to a July launch, as the Sunnyvale company is having trouble with the performance of its chips.
The news was uncovered by the AnandTech website which talked with some unnamed sources who confirmed the news.
“AMD originally wanted to launch Bulldozer at Computex but performance issues with its B0 and B1 stepping chips pushed back the launch.
“Now we're looking at a late July launch with B2 silicon, but performance today is a big unknown. Apparently the performance of B1 stepping silicon doesn't look too good,” reads the AnandTech article.
Right now, we don't know how serious the performance problems the article refers to are, but considering that AMD believes these can be fixed with a single chip revision, they don't seem too severe.
This is not the first time that AMD is having problems with a new architecture.
Shortly after the company launched it first quad-core CPUs from the Phenom line, it has been discovered that the chips suffered from a TLB (translation lookaside buffer) flaw which incurred a performance penalty of at least 10%.
These design problems required AMD to build a new chip stepping, known as B3, which arrived about four months after the initial Phenom release.
At the 2011 Computex, AMD was expected to launch four FX-series processors based on the Bulldozer architecture, two featuring eight processing cores while the other two packed six and respectively four CPU cores.
All four chips were targeting the high-end desktop space and were supposed to feature an unlocked multiplier, support for AMD's Turbo Core 2.0 technology and an integrated dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz controller.
Pricing is expected to start at $190, for the quad-core FX-4110, while the eight-core FX-8130P should retail for $320.