Actually my boss had been told the same thing before these guys reported directly from large server vendors and smaller local custom builders. The 8347 servers were available in smaller supplies by late October by pre-order, but the rest of the Barcelona chips are either sold out everywhere individually or in server builds, or the vendors do not have any more availability of these chips left, neither for immediate order, as they have not been delivered any more chips for their builds, since all the large eaters have ordered and taken mass numbers of the first product offerings from both AMD and secondary vendors. Its true - very high demand and short supply now.
I "think" this is the reason AMD delayed all the desktop releases because they did not have the production capacity which is in demand and did not expect Barcelona to be this well with demand before December, so had initially put those chips on the roadmap but now pulled them far behind to fulfill Opteron orders. And now that they heard about very high demand for +2.0GHz parts, they need all the facilities rolling for Opteron production to gear up for Dec-Jan, because this is where the money lies.
