AMD: Hardware bug must be fixed before volume sales can begin
"We blew it and we are very humbled by it." So said AMD CEO Hector Ruiz, yesterday, referring to the company's troubled quad-core desktop and server processors. Significantly, AMD admitted that a design tweak will be necessary before the chips can be sold in full retail volumes.
As Tech.co.uk has reported, AMD's new quad-core CPUs have suffered from a whole host of problems. In both Opteron server and Phenom desktop trim, the new chips were launched at disappointing clockspeeds. Based largely on the existing K8 core, the architecture underlying AMD's quad-core processors is also arguably too conservative to take the fight to Intel's Core 2 family.
Making matters worse, all of AMD's new quad-core processors harbour a hardware error or circuitry erratum, broadly referred to as the TLB logic bug.
