AMD Admits Delays with 2 Phenom Chips

Advanced Micro Devices, which has been struggling to bring its quad-core microprocessors to market, is delaying the release of two new Phenom desktop chips until the second quarter.

The AMD Phenom 9700 and 9900 chips were originally scheduled to ship this quarter to join the three other Phenom models AMD has already released.

An AMD spokesperson confirmed reports that emerged from this year's International CES expo in Las Vegas that the new processors would be delayed. Instead, the chip maker will concentrate on bringing an energy-efficient model—the Phenom 9100e—and its triple-core chips to the market in the first quarter.

"We are currently shipping hundreds of thousands of Phenoms and, in addition to adding the energy-efficient quad-core Phenom to Q1, we'll also ship our triple-core product offering this quarter," the spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to eWEEK. "This change is viewed favorably by the OEMs who really wanted those [energy-efficient] and triple-core parts."

AMD's quad-core Opteron and Phenom processors have been haunted by a bug within the chips' translation-lookaside buffer, which caused problems with data being transferred from the Level 2 to the Level 3 cache. The latest delay, according to AMD, was not related to this problem, but a decision made to address the needs of more mainstream customers.

The Phenom chip is part of AMD's new desktop platform, which is geared toward use by gamers and in high-end PCs. After the delays were announced, AMD received some good news earlier in January when Hewlett-Packard announced a new PC, the m8330f desktop, which uses a Phenom 9500 chip.