Advanced Micro Devices admitted late on Wednesday that at present it is only shipping sixteen-core AMD Opteron "Interlagos" 6200-series chip for high-end servers with two or four sockets as it is priority for the company. The AMD Opteron "Valencia" 4200-series server processor for entry-level and mainstream servers and FX-series chips for desktops with up to eight cores will become available only in Q4.

"Priority is shipping Interlagos right now, the industry's first x86 16-core. We have several large deals we are working to fulfill with Interlagos," said Phil Hughes, a spokesman for AMD's server division.

AMD admits that due to various technical issues it will not be able to formally launch its server and desktop central processing units based on highly-anticipated Bulldozer micro-architecture in calendar Q3 2011 and will only introduce them officially in the fourth quarter of the year. Given the fact that the chips have been postponed several times already, a delay of several weeks is unlikely to bring a lot of harm.

"We expect to be launching 'Interlagos' in Q4, a little later than we had hoped, but still in time for server deployments in 2011," said John Fruehe, the director of product marketing for server, embedded and FireStream products at AMD.

AMD said that 16-core Opteron 6200-series chips are shipping to all of its key partners now. The big question, however, is whether AMD will be able to fulfill demand for its Opteron 4200-series "Valencia" and FX-series "Zambezi" processors later this year, given the fact that the more expensive Opteron "Interlagos" is prioritized and the demand towards the product is projected to be rather high as the chips will go to both server makers, supercomputer makers and supercomputer customers.

Earlier this year, Cray announced that a number of customers with  Cray XE6 supercomputers will update their systems with AMD Opteron 6200 "Interlagos" processors. Such customers as CSCS – the Swiss National Supercomputer Center, and the University of Edinburgh have all signed up to upgrade their  Cray XE6 supercomputers for their research needs. In addition, Cray also introduced this year its hybrid supercomputing system - the Cray XK6 supercomputer. The highly anticipated new supercomputer will combine Cray's Gemini interconnect, AMD Opteron 6200-series processors (code-named "Interlagos") and Nvidia Tesla 20-series compute cards.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, Interlagos, Valencia, Zambezi, Bulldozer, 32nm, Cray, Tesla