Today AMD officially postponed the launch of its upcoming ClawHammer and Barton code-named processors. According to the current roadmap, the ClawHammer will be delayed at least for about a quarter and Barton is now set to come approximately two month later than it was planned. Officially AMD stated that they need additional time to perform some testing procedures with the x86-64 CPU, though, did not reveal the reason of Barton’s delay.

Even despite of the fact that AMD does its best to develop its CPUs smartly so to tune the technology as rarely as possible, the company still collides with certain problems. Originally, the first x86-64 processor code-named ClawHammer was scheduled to come on October this year. In Summer AMD adjusted its plans and said they will supply the CPUs only for the key-partners this year and the volume production will start in the first quarter, 2003. This time the Sunnyvale-based microprocessor developer announced that they will start to provide the chips for the primary partners during the first quarter next year and mass-production and wide-availability should be expected in the second quarter, 2003. Among the possible reasons of the delay, I would like to point the following ones out (they were first published here):

• Current AMD ClawHammer processors have some problems with reaching the necessary clock-speeds. At the moment AMD tries to redesign the core and add another metal-layer (like it was done with Thoroughbred) in order to increase stability when working at higher frequencies.
• 0.13 micron SOI technology is not as stable as AMD desires it to be. The yield is low, as a result, the price is high. IBM also has the same problem with their Power4 processors, but they are not as concerned about the final price as AMD is. The California based semiconductor maker now even considers all the pros and cons of introducing the ClawHammer CPUs without SOI used in manufacturing.
• Present version of memory controller is also not as stable as a rock and cannot be launched on the market. AMD also works on the matter, according to the source.

I want to note that starting to manufacture the ClawHammer without using SOI technology will probably lead to decrease the speeds of the microprocessors. It is a locked circle, isn’t it? Moreover, the problems with manufacturing technology are not likely to be solved in a number of weeks and I seriously doubt that the x86-64 CPUs will appear earlier than in late February or even March.

What worth mentioning is the fact that AMD decided not to postpone the Opteron chips that are set to come during the first half of 2003. It may happen that both microprocessors will start their attack on the market at the same time.

Talking about Athlon XP “Barton” processors, I should stress that although they are still scheduled to appear either in the fourth quarter of 2002 or the first quarter 2003, according to AMD, some analysts are also sceptical and do not believe the actual launch will happen this year. As a consequence, the most powerful CPU offered by AMD will be the Athlon XP 2700+ that is officially announced on the 7th of October.

Meanwhile Intel will bump the clock-speed of the Pentium 4 processors rapidly, introducing the 3.06GHz model this November and 3.20GHz sometimes in the first half of 2003. As a result, AMD will not be able to compete with Intel in terms of performance for two more quarters. Furthermore, it is quite hard to estimate the performance of direct ClawHammer’s competitor, the Pentium 4 “Prescott” processor, manufactured using 90 nano-meter technology and equipped with 1MB of L2 cache, 667MHz Quad Pumped Bus, the HyperThreading technology and functioning at frequencies above 3.2GHz.