AMD Opteron Launch

AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) has announced that its quad-core Opteron chip (previously codenamed "Barcelona") for servers is ready for launch. The company will start shipping the B3 version of the chip to channel and distribution partners this week.

Earlier, a 2007 release was announced for the quad-core chip but due to a bug discovered in the chip before its launch, the B2 version was distributed only to a select high-performance computing market. The company declared a 2008 release last December. And now that the bug problem is said to have been solved, AMD will start pushing out its product to a wider audience.

t is learnt that system vendors like Dell and Hewlett-Packard (HP) will be adopting AMD's quad-core chip. The chip will be integrated in their upcoming servers to be made available in the second quarter of this year. HP s upcoming ProLiant DL585 will be using the processor.

The Opteron is AMD's first quad-core chip for servers; Intel being the first to introduce its quad-core chip for servers in 2006. Intel implemented the method of putting two dual-core chips together to create its quad-core chip. AMD, on the other hand, has integrated all four cores onto a single chip.