A Barcelona holdup could hurt AMD
Rumors that Advance Micro Devices (AMD) is planning to delay the launch of its upcoming quad-core chip Barcelona have been swirling for months and are intensifying. If true, the move could hurt the chip maker's foothold in the market, cautions an industry observer.
Speculations of the delay began in mid-May, prompting one Citigroup analyst to acknowledge he had confirmation the rumors are true.
Last week, Citigroup's Glen Yeung reportedly said in a research note that Barcelona will indeed be pushed back from a June/July launch date to September or October this year.
In the report, Yeung wrote that "several sources" including server vendors, distributors and motherboard makers, confirmed that the postponement was imminent.
When contacted by ZDNet Asia, an AMD spokesperson declined to confirm if the rumors were true, but said that Barcelona is on track for release this summer, with industry partners shipping Barcelond-based systems at the start of the third quarter of this year.
Commenting on the rumors, Rajnish Arora, research director of enterprise servers and workstations research at IDC Asia-Pacific, did not rule out the possibility. "There's never smoke without fire," Arora told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview Monday.
"Potentially, there could be some truth to that there may be a delay, but AMD might [still] be able to catch up and bring the product out [in time]."
According to Arora, any delay in the launch of Barcelona will be damaging for the chipmaker. "AMD was consistently gaining market [share] until the second half of last year when Intel's Woodcrest platform started ramping up and basically stemmed the growth that AMD achieved in the x86 server market," he said.
"If there is a delay, it may even lead to some erosion in AMD's market share worldwide," he added, noting that the impact would be less severe on the company's business in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to Arora, AMD has 9.6 percent share of the x86 server market in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, for the first quarter of this year.
A delay in launching Barcelona will bode well for AMD's rival Intel, Arora said. "If the rumors are indeed true that Barcelona is getting delayed by a couple of months, it will mean excellent news for Intel because the lead that they had gained in terms of mind share and marketing mileage by being first in the market with the quad-core platform, will help consolidate its position and fend off competition from AMD for a while," he said.
"That will also enable Intel to win back what it lost to AMD over the last couple of years," Arora said. "Commercial and HPC (high-performance computer) customers were starting to look at AMD more aggressively because it had certain competitive advantages."
Arora noted that the Woodcrest platform, and subsequently, the Clovertown quad-core platform which Intel launched in November last year, had helped Intel "get back in the game".