May 24, 2011 19:31 GMT  ·  By

Keenly awaited by many computer enthusiasts, AMD's first desktop Bulldozer processors won't reach retail until the third quarter of 2011, even though the Sunnyvale-based company plans to officially unveil them in early June.

Previous reports have suggested that the Bulldozer announcement that is scheduled to take place on June 11 will be quickly followed by retail availability (June 20-24), but the recent report comes to dismiss these claims.

According to some Taiwanese motherboard makers that have talked to the Sweclockers publication, AMD is not yet ready to launch the FX-series processors into retail and the soon-to-be-released 900-series AM3+ boards will most probably be sold without any Bulldozer processors in sight.

The motherboard makers also stated that, although their solutions are ready for launch, engineers still don't have access to production Bulldozer processors and have to rely on scaled-down and locked engineering samples and on older Phenom II CPUs to test their boards.

As a result, some motherboard makers are even considering postponing the launch of their 900-series products until this situation clarifies, as selling such boards without any FX-series chips could prove to be rather difficult.

This report also seems to be confirmed by a Bulldozer architecture preview, recently posted by the Chinese Expreview website.

As Sweclockers points out, an August or September launch will put AMD's processors dangerously close to the release date of Sandy Bridge-E, which could end up stealing Bulldozer's limelight.

Bulldozer is the name of AMD's next-generation high-performance architecture which will be based on a modular design that was developed in order to eliminate the redundancies found in multi-core architectures.

AMD's first batch of processors will include four chips built on the desktop Zambezi core that will feature eight, six or four processing cores. The fastest processor is the octo-core FX-8130P which has a base frequency of 3.8GHz and a maximum Turbo clock of 4.2GHz.

UPDATE: The AMD Bulldozer delay has been confirmed. The first processors were expected to launch at Computex 2011, but AMD has posponed these for a July launch, as it plans to build a new revision that should fix some performance problems found in the B0 and B1 steppings. Read more here.