AMD's quad-core chip to launch next month

AMD is set to officially launch Barcelona in September, six months behind schedule due to the quad-core server processor's "complicated" design, according to CEO Hector Ruiz.

In an interview published in the San Jose Mercury News, Ruiz said: "Every time we ran into a gotcha [or a technical glitch], it created a six-week-or-so hole in the schedule as we went back and fixed it.

"We hoped we wouldn't get many of those but in the Barcelona case, we got more than we thought. By the time we got through fixing them all, we were six months-plus later from where we originally wanted to be."

That's been a very difficult six months for AMD, as its server division suffered through a price war without a fresh new product to parade before server buyers.

AMD chose to put four processor cores on a single piece of silicon when creating Barcelona. The company claims that this will deliver better performance than Intel's method of building a quad-core chip but it was trickier to implement.

Intel simply put two dual-core chips together in a single package, and while that won't win any awards from chip design purists, it did allow Intel to ship quad-core chips in November of last year. Barcelona is only now shipping to AMD's partners, and it will be formally launched on 10 September, Ruiz confirmed.

The delay, along with Intel price cuts, forced AMD to significantly discount the prices of its dual-core server chips to compete and eroded its profits.

Tom Krazit writes for CNET News.com