Posted on Friday, January 11 2008 @ 14:57 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Instead of these higher-clocked Phenom parts the firm will focus on triple-core processors and two energy-efficient Phenom processors:
In place of the delayed chips, AMD plans to focus on its triple-core chips and bring forward the launch of two energy-efficient Phenom processors. It says it's doing this at the request of its customers, which is what AMD (and lots of companies, to be fair) says every time it has to defend a decision. The unanswered question is, if that's really what customers wanted, why didn't you say that in December during the analyst meeting?
Just under a month ago, AMD said the Phenom chips were on track for the first quarter. But PC design cycles take months; if HP or Dell wanted energy-efficient chips during the first quarter as opposed to the more powerful varieties, they would have known that quite some time ago, certainly in time to update the road map at AMD's analyst day.
The representative did admit that "resources" forced AMD's hand to a certain degree, which is code for "we've only got so many chip plants, we've got all these chips we need to build and so we can only build so many of certain kinds." The triple-core chips that AMD plans to emphasize in the first quarter are a creative way of reusing quad-core chips with slight defects to one core. The energy-efficient chips are expected to run at slower clock speeds than the 9900 or 9600, which makes them easier to produce.
