Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Re: I wonder what the delay is about. It can't be heat, power, or dumbness issues as none of those kept INTC from releasing Paxville. Maybe it's because Paxville is proving such a hit that INTC doesn't want to slow sales down with comparisons to Montecito. Yeah, that's got to be it Montecito in its' current configuration is just too good.

Montecito was delayed because of quality issues. That usually means late breaking bugs - probably hard to hit corner cases - that can mean a big deal in high reliability server systems. Obviously it wasn't anything obvious, since samples have been out to customers for months already, but it still opens up a rather wide range of possibilities that may have nothing to do with heat of power (and likely not "dumness" either, genius). One of the worst schedule hits can come when a bug is found on production candidate silicon. This means it needs to be debugged (which can take weeks), it needs to be root caused and fixed (as long as another couple of weeks), the silicon needs to be respun on a new stepping (could take a couple months, depending on the changes required), and needs to be revalidated (could take several more weeks). Opteron went through many delays before finally shipping in Spring, 2003, and none of the reasons were due to heat, power, or "dumness". ^_^