wbmw, I think (in retrospect) that a very good argument can be made that first Hammer should have been done on bulk silicon. Probably would have been able to ship last year.
That is in retrospect, however. Hammer was not the processor slated to be the first on SOI, Barton was. It may seem silly that AMD is introducing such a drastic manufacturing change with Hammer, but that ignors the rolling disaster that we call 2002.
Right now AMD is playing the hand they hold very well in that they are focussing on server Opterons running a clock rates which are safe. This gives them a buffer in case there are continuing problems, and time to integrate lessons recently purchased from IBM.
Yes, I wish that 2002 went better and Barton was released on SOI as planned. Can't take wishes to the market, though, so AMD has to perform on their fallback plan (servers now, speedy desktops in September).
If AMD succeeds and corners the commodity 64-bit market then all of this will be forgotton. If they don't, it doesn't matter.
My money is on the successful outcome. I'll be patient. :)
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