14 April 2008
by Billy MacInnes
AMD started shipping its delayed ‘Barcelona’ quad core Opteron processors last week, nearly seven months after they were officially launched, with HP and a number of smaller vendors announcing products based on the chips.
The arrival of Barcelona, which was put back after the discovery of a design fault, comes two weeks after AMD announced a range of three core and quad core processors aimed at the gaming and consumer market, known as Phenom.
The vendor is hoping the Phenom and Barcelona processors will help to boost its fortunes after a difficult 12 months and last week’s announcement of plans to reduce the company’s workforce by ten per cent.
Commenting on the widespread availability of Barcelona chips, AMD marketing director for EMEA, Richard Baker, said it demonstrated the vendor’s ability to provide channel partners with a "greater choice of systems to sell to customers and to better address their changing needs".
Sukh Dhillon, regional sales manager at AMD distributor Avnet Computer Components, said the delayed launch of Barcelona had resulted in built-up demand in the market, but Avnet had been shipping to customers since the beginning of the quarter.
"Dependent on the application, many customers are seeing the benefits of Barcelona and AMD should successfully regain market share in the server CPU space," he added. "The roadmap shows strong focus in server with the 45nm version set to arrive in H2 2008."
Baker also highlighted the importance of the Phenom processor family to AMD in the consumer space and the attractions it presented to the channel, describing it as "vitally important to us".
Dhillon at Avnet said channel demand had been reinvigorated in the AMD X4 Phenom desktop, mainly prompted by positive reviews starting to filter through.
