AMD battles Barcelona delay rumours

AMD is denying reports that claim that its highly anticipated Barcelona quad core processor has been hit by a delay, a company spokesperson said.

Barcelona is scheduled for release this summer and is still on track, said AMD spokesperson Andrew Fox.

Working up to the launch, the company is the first working production chips at the Computex tradeshow in Taipei, Taiwan this week.

Cray computer started raining on the chipmaker's cheer parade when it warned that its upcoming XT4 supercomputer would be delayed because of production problems with the quad core AMD processor.

A story by the Dow Jones newswire on Wednesday quoted Cray spokesperson Steve Conway as saying that Barcelona was behind the delay. Conway declined to comment. Instead he pointed to news reports that discredited his original quote.

Cray's XT4 in fact will be using Budapest, another quad core AMD chip that has always been scheduled for a late 2007 release. The Budapest chip intended for low cost single socket servers for application in file servers, print servers and other less CPU-intensive tasks.

Also, on Tuesday Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung said that he believed that the chip would be delayed. He based his findings on conversations with server vendors at the Computex tradeshow and pegged the new release date at September/October.

The two reports sent down AMD stock on both Tuesday and Wednesday, as a delay would have a large impact on the chipmaker's profitability.

AMD has hyped Barcelona as the chip that will allow the company to take back the performance per Watt lead from Intel, a metric that indicated that the chip offers the best balance of power consumption and performance. The processor therefore is considered a key weapon in the war with AMD's larger chip rival.