Advanced Micro Devices announced yesterday that its new line of quad-core Opteron microprocessors would not be widely available until the first quarter of 2008, although the company had previously taken the end of 2007 as deadline. According to Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesperson, the chip maker was forced to slow down shipment of its new Opteron processors, also known as Barcelona, because of an error that it recently located on the L3 cache of the chip.

So, although there are a number of fixes to this problem, including a BIOS fix that AMD has already issued, the company was forced to delay the mass shipments of the new quad-core microprocessors to the first quarter of 2008. However, while AMD is working with partners to fine-tune the chip, a limited number of customers running high-performance computers are already provided with the new quad-core models.

Unfortunately for AMD, the error that forced it to delay mass shipments of Opteron seems to have also affected its recently released quad-core Phenom desktop microprocessors. AMD will obviously be wounded by these problems, especially that in the recent quarters it has continually lost ground in the server chip market to rival Intel.

After months of delay, Advanced Micro Devices managed to release Barcelona in September 2007, but only two months later Intel took another step ahead by launching the 45-nm quad-core Penryn processor. AMD is still using the 65-nm manufacturing process.