AMD admits Technical Obstacles On Barcelona Release

Rumors have been spreading around that AMD is facing obstacles, causing delay to the release of its Barcelona processor from original schedule. During the recent interview session, AMD Chief Executive, Hector Ruiz, admitted that there are some technical issues to be resolved during the development phase before the official release of this next generation micro-architecture quad-core processor.

Although no further detail being disclosed on what the road blocks are, but it is believed to be related to some bugs fixing with silicon stepping that require extra effort and time which were not factored in during planning stage. Hot discussions around these topics such as power management and floating point non-full feature support made the situation even worst. The power management, known as Dual Dynamic scheme which has been deployed on this Opteron chip may work well without a new BIOS update. This feature  would allow tremendous power saving on individual cores when not being utilized by stepping down the core voltage and frequency respectively. Also the 128-bit floating point support and actual performance are in doubt as there is no pre silicon benchmarking figure available as of now.
The delay has great impact to the company reputation and driving its current consumers away to competitors’ products. As the new schedule is approaching, hopefully, AMD is able to release ‘on time’ this round and regain its market shares with the launching of long-waited Barcelona and a clearer road map by next month.