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Opteron

Posted on 8 Feb 2008 at 12:14

In his opening statement, looking like a man who hasn't had much sleep since AMD's share price began sliding to 68% below its level at the beginning of January 2007, Meyer said: "Last month [November 2007], while we were in the final stages of system validation, we uncovered a design error... we have delayed general availability of our Barcelona server product until next quarter [Q1 2008]". He added that the error is, "sensitised under very obscure operating conditions". The result of this is that quad-core Opterons, rather than being generally distributed to vendors, were being shipped to, "large cluster installations where we can be sure that the error won't be sensitised".

According to AMD, full production of quad-core Opterons has now restarted. We're going to keep hold of the server chassis and, as soon as we get production samples of the new processors, we'll test them head-to-head against Intel to get the definitive picture as to which is best. Despite the lack of Barcelona this month, we've gone ahead and looked at the Intel-based server and assessed it on its own terms for performance and power consumption.

Back to 'AMD vs Intel' main page.

Author: David Fearon