Oddly enough, this makes even more sense if we combine it with previous rumours. Remember the one at the Inq about the new process stepping that had people "dancing in the aisles" ?

Maybe - and this is a wild guess - maybe they found they needed this new stepping to get decent yields and clock speeds out of the processor, and it just took them by surprise how much it made things better. This though, has the effect of delaying all your stuff by a bit.

Hell, maybe they needed the new process stepping just to get the slower speeds out too.

Last thing I saw from AMD stated that Barcelona server chips would be shipping in the third quarter, and that the desktop variant, phenom, would be shipping afterwards. I see nothing in this info that would indicate any deviation from this schedule.

So, why the "late" description (followed of course by a question mark, since maybe the author isn't really sure whether he's reporting it "late" or "on time as previously announced")...?...;)

No doubt that Barcelona definitely is coming "later than expected." However, note that often "later than expected" doesn't actually mean "late," because no matter what, when a company announces it will ship something "second quarter" there are lots of people who translate "second quarter" as "first quarter," so that when the second quarter arrives and the product ships they can say it was "late".

Does this make sense? I don't think so. The practice nevertheless seems very popular. Saying something's "late" seems to confer to the author a hint of insider access that, really, doesn't seem all that deserved. After all, anyone can ask the question. Answering it, though, just seems so much more relevant and interesting.

(If you can tell, I'm not a fan of story titles ending with question marks, because it seems to me that if you have to ask the question then you don't have enough info to write the story in the first place, right? Just a thought.)

It is really sad when a flame war starts from a simple "rumored annoncment date from the INQ".

As I have stated numerous times, AMD should stand for 'another month's delay'.

Erm....

The date was not the 6th of October, it was the 10th of June, ie yesterday.. The Canadian Grand Prix, in Montreal...

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40227

;p

I just wanna throw this out there: in a thread about the lateness of of AMDNGMA, the two most talked about topics are socket 939 and date formats. lol.

man AMD have really made a mess of things lately, good products don't cut it in the fickle hardware market CPU's have to be more than competitive and no matter what some form of high end offering has to be available.

AMD really shot their foot off when they dropped socket 939 support so quickly pushing alot of enthusiasts to Intel, that incredibly stupid 4X4 release only hastened things along and now they are only able to sell low margin inexpensive EE cpu's things are not rosy at all in the green camp.

I honestly think maybe the public was expecting too much out of a company that just merged with another major company and redid their entire fab process at the same time.

Also after a lot of us went AM2 its still early for an upgrade anyway. Actually I'm still on s939 with an Opteron 185. All I want to see from AMD is a 65nm Radeon HD 2900XT/X with 1gb because even the 80nm current process overclocks to hell and back.

If your system takes 20 seconds longer than a C2D to get a job done and you cant wait that long then maybe its time you sit down and read a book to recondition your mind and regain some of your lost patience. Or possibly you just need Adderall XR 30mg.

I'm a teeny bit surprised AMD hasn't announced a 6100+ or 6200+ Athlon 64 in the absence / lateness of Barcelona / Agena, and maybe they still will. And I'm also surprised by the fact that the majority of their CPU SKUs are still based on 90-nano. I am not surprised in the least by this announcement though. Every product intro AMD has ever done has always come latter than first expected and even then initial availability was always very tight and why should we expect anything different now with this the most complicated ever x86 CPU to manufacture? If I was one to wager, I'd put all my money on any meaningful availability of these CPUs being 6-9 months away.

Dammit AMD, thats the third monocle I've broken this year.

Intel isn't exactly going super-fast ether.

The only two upcoming things that are newsworthy are persistent rumors of a significant price cut on Q6xxx family and upcoming Penyrns.

It seems like Intel is waiting for K10 to launch before making a move with Penyrns.

Well that will officially make me an Intel man...

Did AMD inherit ATI's execution problems or what?

ouch.... just ouch.

Times like these are when the monetary cracks of AMD show through. If Intel keeps up this breakneck pace, AMD won't be able to keep up. They simply can't--they don't have the money for it.

Ugh. Come on AMD pull yourself out of this rut.