Quote Originally Posted by savantu View Post
Well, Cray won the deal on those supercomputers when AMD probably didn't even had silicon in hand. Cray has to supply at a certain date a certain number of FLOPs. On each, you have a penalty for missing the target. Penalty is ussually in the millions $. Cray commited based on AMD assurances ( contract between Cray and AMD, AMD at the time could not forsee things will be that s**y ).
Well, considering Cray has had issues with supply in the past with AMD, I think they most likely wiggled themselves some buffer before committing on contracts related to delivery/timing of systems featuring BD, they had been bitten once before. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb061207-story07.html