At last, AMD ships quad-core Opterons

After significant delays caused by a design bug, AMD is now shipping quad-core "Barcelona" Opteron processors in volume.

Barcelona processors were delayed back in December of last year because of an L3 cache bug which caused applications to fail.  Rather than ship processors containing the bug, AMD pulled them until the issue could be resolved, a move which at the time caused analysts to question whether AMD was capable of shipping these processors in high volumes.

With the bug out of the way these quad-core processors will now be making their way to server OEMs such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun, IBM, and Dell.

With Barcelona out of the door, eyes turn to the next AMD server offering.  AMD's next server processor, codenamed Montreal, is expected to ship late in 2009 and will come in four and eight core versions.

Thoughts?