It appears as if AMD's Barcelona woes will carry over into the new year. Afterthe new quad-core processor's launch was delayed half a year due to what company CEO Hector Ruiz called "technical problems," widespread shipments have now hit another production snag on account of a technical glitch known in the processor industry as an erratum.
The news isn't a revelation for anyone who tuned into AMD's Q3 earnings call, where executives acknowledged that its initial ramp of Barcelona was likely to be slower than expected. On Friday, however, AMD reaffirmed that its quad-core Opteron chips (formerly known as Barcelona) won't go mainstream until Q1 of next year. Indeed, the ones that are shipping now have all been earmarked for customers in the server and desktop segments, AMD says. In other words, don't expect to pick up an quad-core Opteron at Newegg until January at the earliest.
The reason for the slower-than-expected commercial roll-out, according to the chipmaker, has something to do with misbehaving Translation Lookaside Buffers, which are parts of the microarchitecture that improve access to system memory.
According to AMD's Phil Hughes, to date, none of AMD's customers have had TLB issues with the chips, but the company has nevertheless issued a BIOS fix and plans to address this issue at the silicon level early next year.
"When any high-performance processor starts shippping, there's always errata," Hughes says. "It's very common and you usually address (them) through software or microcode patch. We did a BIOS fix," he says.
What's interesting here is that Intel had what looks to be a similar problem with its Core 2 processors earlier this year. Apparently, AMD's chief rival solved the problem quickly with a BIOS fix, as well.
