AMD delays two quad-core chips

AMD has delayed the launch of two of its Phenom processors.

The company has confirmed that two of the quad-core processors will be delayed for a few months. The admission was made to the Ars Technica website on Thursday.

An AMD representative confirmed that the Phenom 9900 and 9700 are being pushed into the second quarter of 2008, after they were originally scheduled to launch this quarter. In place of the delayed chips, AMD said it plans to focus on its triple-core chips and bring forward the launch of two energy-efficient Phenom processors, according to the report.

AMD announced the triple-core processors a week after the launch of the quad-core Barcelona processor in September.

Otherwise identical in every respect to the quad-core version, with 512KB of level-2 cache per core and 3MB of shared level 3-cache, the triple-core processor differs only in that the fourth core is disabled.

It is common semiconductor industry practice to sell partially disabled products as lower-specification items while production problems are being sorted out, or when the producer wants to create a market for lower-cost products without starting up a separate fabrication line for them.