14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, AMD has stopped all the shipments of quad-core Opteron processors due to a product glitch. The company has issued a workaround that heavily affects the system performance, but, at least, gave it the opportunity of delivering "tens of thousands" of processors to HPC builders and to some other select customers. The vast majority, however, will have to wait for the redesigned version, due to arrive in the first quarter of the next year.
The situation resembles another incident that took place earlier this year, when AMD ran short of parts to its white box channel. The company admitted that this happened because they were massively shipping to tier-one partners like Dell at system builders' expenses. Gary Bixler, director of worldwide channel development at AMD said that, this time, system builders are not being shorted on shipments for the tier-ones' advantage.
"The hard cold truth is, we are continuing to ship Barcelona to select customers, but the majority of those shipments are actually going to the channel," he said, aiming at HPC clusters builders, a part of AMD's white box channel. This business is the only one that can take advantage of the Barcelonas, since large cluster systems are not terribly affected by a 20 percent performance degradation. "At a minimum, we're spreading the misery equally to our partners. It's a tough time, but we'll work through it," Bixler continued.
Bixler stated that AMD's channel partners are still interested in AMD's Barcelona processor line and that they appreciate the company response after a massive failure. However, Bixler admits that the company should have informed its partners earlier.
"Our channel customers are appreciative that we stood up and took ownership of the issue instead of trying to market our way around it. They're still tremendously disappointed in our product situation, as we all are," he said. "We still get feedback that, 'I wish you guys would have done that [admitted to ramp problems] a lot sooner.' But the partners I talk to, they're still 100 percent committed to this product and the longer-term story of AMD."
Bixler also defended AMD for their mess-up, and said that the semiconductor industry is full of design issues, but that will not prevent the company from going on.
"This is far from our first rodeo. We've delivered millions of processors and we know how to do it. We dropped the ball in this instance and we're sick about it, but we're going to dust ourselves off and fix the problem and get the product out very soon," he said.