Barcelona delay could hurt AMD
Rumours that 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 chipmaker's foothold in the market, warns an industry observer.
Speculations of the delay began in mid-May, prompting one Citigroup analyst to acknowledge he had confirmation that the rumours 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 rumours were true, but said that Barcelona is on track for release this summer, with industry partners shipping Barcelona-based systems at the start of the third quarter of this year.
Commenting on the rumours, 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 said in a phone interview on Monday.
"Potentially, there could be some truth to [the rumour] 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," Arora 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 rumours 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 that Intel launched in November last year, had helped Intel "get back in the game".