In the ever-more complicated and ever-smaller world of computer processors, even the tiniest error can have major ramifications. In September, chip manufacturer AMD announced the global launch of a new quad-core Opteron processor that was codenamed Barcelona.
As AMD chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz acknowledged at the time, the launch was a good six months later than AMD had hoped it would be. Its chief rival, Intel, had introduced its own quad-core processor nearly a year earlier. AMD was in the uncomfortable position of playing catch-up in the market of high-end, cutting-edge processors and wrestling, as Ruiz vaguely put it, with “technical problems.”
But as AMD got ready to ramp up full-scale production on the Opteron chip, it got more bad news. A bug was identified in a section of the chip’s architecture known as the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB). Although AMD said that none of its customers have had issues with the bug, the company nonetheless issued a fix to address the problem.
More Bad News
There are some suggestions that although the patch might prevent the random crashes caused by the TLB problem, the fix causes its own problems, including a significant slowdown of desktop applications (up to 13 percent), and an even greater slowdown to virtualized systems.
Some commentators indicated that various OS manufacturers, including Microsoft and Red Hat, have come up with a work-around that avoids the performance penalty. In general, however, industry OEMs are holding off on offering the new AMD processor until the first quarter of 2008, when the company promises that the TLB issue will be resolved in manufacturing.
In a statement sent out to the media last Thursday, AMD said that it identified the problem and provided purchasers with the fix. “AMD notified customers of this erratum,” the company said, “and released a BIOS fix prior…