AMD Barcelona plagued by production issues

While this doesn't come as a surprise--we've been hearing for a while now that Barcelona was hitting a few production snags--it's still extremely disappointing: AMD is delaying shipments of 65nm Barcelona CPUs due to a technical flaw. Though the chip officially launched in September, availability has been scarce in retail channels. Now, AMD is confirming that the chips won't see widespread availability until early 2008, due to a glitch that could cause the chips to fail. "We're continuing to ship it but only to specific customers," said AMD spokesperson John Taylor. Additionally, the company will offer existing Barcelona customers a workaround for the flaw, until a new version of the chips is available next year.

In other AMD news, the company will resurrect its K8 architecture with new "Brisbane" based chips. Apparently, the company will release 11 new K8 parts over the next two quarters--but only three new K10 Phenom chips.

For more on AMD's production woes:
- see this New York Times article
- and this DailyTech article on the K8 CPUs