A few days ago, a French website reported that AMD people had unofficially told them that there were problems with the B3 stepping and had to do another spin to get it right.
Someone official at AMD gave a “Yes, we have no bananas” response, saying, “No, we have no TLB problems, but yes, we have a delay.”
In all likelihood, fixing the TLB broke something else, and they had to fix that, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter whether the delay was caused by faulty silicon or a faulty toilet, it’s a delay, and squabbling over the exact reason why really doesn’t matter.
What was far more interesting was AMD saying that there would not be any further 65nm steppings. Whatever we get in May or June or whenever is it. AMD doesn’t apparently plan to slog its way through to higher speeds like it did with the X2s.
The next K10 stepping will be the first 45nm chips. While there may be, probably is, excellent reason to move on from 65nm, keep in mind that the first of these chips won’t show up for sale until September at best, and wouldn’t become plentiful/cheap (unless they’re really slow) until 2009.
Yes, it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, but it only goes to show what a deep hole AMD is now in.
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