Published in PC Hardware

Barcelonas are hard to come by

by on15 October 2007

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AMD turning its back on the channel

 

A month on since the native quad core Barcelona launch it seems that AMD has run into some supply troubles. ChannelWeb talked to several channel partners, to check out how AMD's new baby was doing and these chaps had some interesting things to say.

Brian Corn, VP of marketing and business development at Source Code, and Corn made several interesting remarks concerning the availability of quad core Opterons. As far as the hardware side of things goes, Corn had only words of praise for AMDs new part.

"There are no hardware conflicts and the power draw is as promised. They delivered on their technicals. On these high-performance compute and memory-intensive applications, they're kicking Intel's butt," said Corn.

But he was far from pleased when it comes to AMD's customer relations in the system builder channel.

"We're extremely disappointed with AMD on a product delivery level. What's nice about the product is it runs great, it's rock solid, it really performs. The real problem seems to be is that AMD doesn't have any of these things," he said.

Corn went on to say that AMD offered no response to numerous questions concerning the availability of the new products and that the company had turned its back on the channel, taking care of their teir ones and favored partners instead.

Not all partners have experienced similar problems, but the delivery of quad core Opterons has been an issue among some.

Shah Gautam, president of custom server builder Colfax also praised the new chip, but he too said that it looks like AMD is focused on tier one customers in the initial phase.

Appro International has ordered some 48 thousand Opterons for its Linux computing clusters ordered by the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national labaratories. It claims that the new CPU is a winner, but John Lee, VP of advanced technology solutions, says that "the rollout wasn't as crisp as we would have liked."

Demand seems to be great, but it's beginning to look as if the numerous delays have chained AMD to tier one customers in this initial phase, and that it's forced to put the channel on hold, at least until it can fulfill its obligations to tier ones. Hopefully this situation won't last long.

You can read the original article here and we already wrote that Theplanet still doesn't have its own Barcelonas here.

Last modified on 15 October 2007
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