AMD Zambezi news, info, fans !

[savantu]

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

You can wiggle a few months, but not 2-3 quarters. The customers aren't stupid, they've seen too the marketing slides from AMD, they've done their homework. If they were told Interlagos will be H1 ( Q2 ) , then rest assured they didn't expect to get it in early Q4. On HPC supercomputers, researchers apply for time slices, there is a lot of preparation going on even before the computer is installed. Imagine going back and saying " Hello everyone, we're delaying everything by 6 months ".

How likely are those customers to order again AMD based systems and even more interesting, how likely is Cray to bet high end deals on Opteron CPUs ? What about IBM, HP, Dell in the commercial sector ? Imagine production and banking systems. The factory is ready, the server is MIA or they're forced in the interim to use previous generation CPUs. Imagine the penalties and the extra downtime for upgrading once Interlagos is available. If you find the answer to these, AMD's server market share of <6% suddenly is explained.