AMD Server and Workstation Vice President, Randy Allen, has told IT Week that despite setbacks the outfit is preparing to ship quad-cores in volume a year late. However, Allen said that he is confident it can maintain market share against rival Intel, which has been pursuing an aggressive introduction of multi-core server chips of its own.

Barcelona Quad-cores were found to have an issue that affected the translation look-aside buffer (TLB) in the L3 cache shared among all the cores on the chip. While no users reported trouble it restricted the release because it could have caused systems to crash. This would have been unacceptable to many of the enterprise customers expected to invest in servers based on the quad-core Opteron, so AMD made the decision to interrupt volume production of the chips. He said it was easy to fix the problem but it had to go through shed loads of QA afterwards.

AMD claims not to have suffered significant losses from the episode and its overall market share stayed steady throughout 2007. Allen admitted that Intel's Nehalem is a threat, but wondered why it has taken Intel so long to come up with QuickPath when AMD had the architecture five years ago and has been making improvements ever since.

The full interview is here.