Advanced Micro Devices on Friday said that it would ship its native quad-core microprocessors for servers in August, whereas servers and workstations based on the new chips will be on sale in September. This officially confirms that the world’s second largest manufacturer of x86 chips has delayed the intro of its highly-anticipated product by several months.

Initially the company will ship quad-core AMD Opteron processors at clock-speeds of up to 2.0GHz with reduced power consumption, whereas higher-performance chips are projected to be available in Q4 2007. As a result, even though the company did not manage to roll-out new code-named Barcelona chips in mid-2007, as it promised originally, the chipmaker can formally claim that its quad-core chips will be available already in Q3 2007.

“More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance. With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option,” explained Randy Allen, corporate vice president, server and workstation division at AMD.

Quad-core AMD Opteron processors code-named Barcelona are based on the company’s next-generation micro-architecture and will be produced using 65nm process technology. Among the highlights of AMD’s new chips the manufacturer lists shared 2MB L3 cache, 128-bit floating point units (FPU), SSE4A instructions, support for dual-channel DDR2 memory and other innovations.

“AMD has prioritized production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen,” Mr. Allen added.