AMD insists Shanghai won't be another Barcelona

AMD INSISTS that Shanghai, its next generation of server-centric processor chips, won't be plagued by the same problems that hampered its roll-out of Barcelona, damaging the company's reputation and profitability.

The world's second largest chip shop admitted that it had made huge mistakes getting Barcelona to market, and that production cock-ups and core limitations delayed the launch by up to eight months.

As AMD's Pat Patla told Cnet, "We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible. Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again,"

And if AMD is ever to regain its place at the top of the processor heap, it needs Shanghai to roll out, and more importantly, work, flawlessly. Not least because the server market is currently the only sector in which the company turns a decent profit.

So AMD has assigned an unnamed lead engineer to take over the entire Shanghai project, and Patla has promised to make sure that the product AMD hands over to its partners is of substantial stability so that they can do lots of early validation.

"We're in full production right now in the factory," he said. "People will start getting first silicon from the final production very shortly."

Which all means that the original launch scheduled for Q1 of 2009 now looks like it will happen in Q4 of 2008. Perhaps AMD was being overly cautious after the disaster that was Barcelona, and have now realised that it doesn't need the extra time.

Let's hope the folks at AMD are right because, if this one goes the same way as Barcelona did, there will be hell to pay. µ

L'Inq
Cnet