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AMD delays Hammer for desktops


Turn out the liiiiiights, the party's oooooover.




By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
September 12, 2002, 2:32 PM PT
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-957757.html

Advanced Micro Devices has pushed out the release of its highly anticipated Hammer chip for desktops by almost a quarter, and will delay the release of another Athlon chip.

The desktop version of Hammer, which is code-named Clawhammer and will be marketed under the Athlon brand name, will now ship to PC manufacturers in the first quarter of 2003 and will hit store shelves toward the end of the first quarter or at the beginning of the second quarter, said John Crank, senior branding associate at AMD.

Earlier, AMD planned to ship Clawhammer to manufacturers by the end of the fourth quarter and have it on store shelves in the first quarter.

Opteron, a version of Hammer for servers, will still come out in the first half.

Similarly, the company will postpone the commercial release of "Barton" a new version of the Athlon chip with a performance-enhancing 512KB secondary cache, from the second half of this year to the first quarter of next year.

The delays are occurring to accommodate the release of a new version of Athlon with a 333MHz bus, said Crank. Current Athlons come with a 200MHz bus and 256KB of secondary cache. Typically, a faster bus, which is the main data conduit between the processor and memory, means better performance. An Athlon with the faster bus will come out this quarter, he added.

Although it encountered few missteps in manufacturing in 2000 and 2001, AMD has been bogged down a bit by delays this year. The Athlon XP 2400+, originally due in the second quarter, is slated to come out this month. The company also redesigned the Athlon this summer to reduce energy consumption.

AMD lost two points of market share in the past quarter and posted a loss for the fourth straight quarter.

Rival Intel, meanwhile, is continuing to push the gas pedal on the Pentium 4. A 3GHz version will debut this quarter, the company said this week.