Tuesday, 21 August 2007

AMD Says Design Problems Delayed Barcelona Launch

AMD, the world’s second largest chipmaker says the launch of Barcelona chip wass being delayed by further six months as the design has run into technical problems...

AMD, the world’s second largest chipmaker says the launch of Barcelona chip wass being delayed by further six months as the design has run into technical problems.

AMD CEO Hector Ruiz said the "complicated" design that AMD chose for Barcelona caused more than six months of delays.

Ruiz said, "Every time we ran into a gotcha, it created a six-week-or-so hole in the schedule as we went back and fixed it. We hoped we wouldn't get many of those, but in the Barcelona case, we got more than we thought. By the time we got through fixing them all, we were six months-plus later from where we originally wanted to be."

Barcelona which is AMDs’ first quad core processor will be launched in September.

With Barcelona, AMD decided to put four processor cores on a single piece of silicon, which according to the company will deliver better performance than Intel's method of building a quad-core chip, but it was trickier to implement. Intel simply put two dual-core chips together in a single package enabling Intel to ship quad-core chips in November 2006.