AMD has confirmed that its quad-core processors will ship in August, with the first systems using them expected as early as September. The announcement came amid speculation that the long-awaited chips had been delayed and might not appear until 2008.

The Quad-Core Opteron, previously codenamed Barcelona, is AMD's first offering in the quad-core processor space. Its introduction comes nearly a year after rival Intel's debut of quad-core Xeon chips, but AMD said its design integrates all cores onto a single piece of silicon and is more efficient, and also does not rely on a single shared bus to communicate with the rest of the system.

"Barcelona's native quad core architecture features four cores on a single die of silicon. In contrast, Xeon offers a new packaging of old processors with no enhancements," said John Fruehe, Worldwide MarketDevelopment Manager, AMD

Like current chips, Quad-Core Opteron will target both server and workstation markets. AMD said its partners are "fully on board" with the new processors and that it expected strong industry support when they become available.

However, some have questioned when AMD will be able to meet demand for the new chips. Ovum senior analyst Carl Gressum noted that volume supply has lagged initial shipments by 12 to 18 months in the past.

"It's very apparent that AMD is not talking much about the second half of this year anymore, and all the talk seems to be on the back end of 2008," he said.

The first chips will be available in frequencies up to 2GHz initially, but AMD said it expects to introduce higher speeds by the end of 2007 in both standard and special edition versions of the chips.

Gressum said that this was a little disappointing, and that the firm needed to quickly get speeds up to at least 2.4GHz in order to effectively compete with newer Intel chips.

Despite this, he believes AMD has a secure foothold in the enterprise from which it can expand in future.

"The Opteron did the groundwork, and Barcelona can get them back in the game, but they have rested too long on their laurels," he said.

The new quad-core chips are designed to operate within the same thermal envelope as current Opteron processors, helping reduce cooling needs in datacentres. However, they will boost performance by up to 70 percent on some database applications and up to 40 percent on certain floating point applications, AMD claimed.