AMD Sees Newly-Released 16-Core Chips as Priority

AMD may have hoped to succeed in launching the Bulldozer during the third quarter of 2011, but even with the formal release of the Interlagos, the Bulldozer is still not coming out in time.

When Advanced Micro Devices issued a certain press release yesterday, part of the consumer base no doubt rejoiced.

Basically, the Sunnyvale, California-based company announced it had begun shipping the first Bulldozer processors.

Unfortunately, the downer to the news was the fact that only one chip, the 16-core Opteron 'Interlagos', was shipping to key partners.

Apparently, as reports now have it, the company was forced to scrap its plans to push availability in the July-September period and settled for the fourth quarter instead.

The reason Interlagos appeared first is because it is seen as a sort of priority by AMD.

That said, various technical issues interfered with the timely completion of the AMD Opteron 'Valencia' 4200-series server units, so prospective customers have to wait until the fourth quarter of 2011.

"Priority is shipping Interlagos right now, the industry's first x86 16-core. We have several large deals we are working to fulfill with Interlagos," said Phil Hughes, a spokesman for AMD's server division.

"We expect to be launching 'Interlagos' in Q4, a little later than we had hoped, but still in time for server deployments in 2011," added John Fruehe, the director of product marketing for server, embedded and FireStream products at AMD.

Speaking of the fourth quarter, there is a certain other product line that will make its appearance then, the so-called 'Zambezi' desktop series.

Like their server cousins, they were meant to come out sooner (around June), but the initial versions proved problematic.

Recent revelations thus mean that, ironically, even postponing the launch until August or September wasn't enough. The unlocked Llano APUs with the K moniker should debut in Q4 as well.