AMD's Quad-Cores: A 1-Month Report Card

"They probably care more about their Tier 1 customers in the initial phase. Maybe that ramp-up has been faster than expected, so the channel is always the last, you know," he said.

But whereas Source Code's Corn felt AMD was still lagging on delivery too far past such a highly-promoted launch date, Gautam wasn't fussed with the rate of the ramp-up.

"Right now it's running at a week or so lead-time on orders, which is to be expected. We can place orders and get product when we need it. From that perspective, just a few weeks after the launch, it's been a pleasant surprise," he said.

Like his peers, Gautam was pleased with the product itself. And nearly every source ChannelWeb spoke with reported a great deal of interest in quad-core Opterons from customers.

"Customers have just been amping for this, holding their breath. So people weren't making purchases of existing products, because they were waiting for Barcelona, like people will wait for a big movie premiere," said Appro's Lee.

On the distribution side, feedback on customer demand was a little more mixed.

"The AMD business is at a good healthy run-rate and we're definitely seeing interest from our system integrators for the new quad-core. Sales are coming in daily and the team is working hard to get the products to market," said a spokesperson for Ingram Micro in an e-mail.

Across the aisle at Tech Data, it was a different story.

"It doesn't sound like processors are a big conversation starter from our customers," a spokesperson for the distributor told ChannelWeb.

For Corn, the hope is that AMD gets its act together on getting Source Code the product it wants. Because despite the hassles, Barcelona is definitely a CPU that his company does want.

"The silver lining is that they have a rock solid product. The samples that went out, the benchmarks are great. The demand is huge. We can work with the typical one- or two-week delay of delivery after a 'paper launch.' But in this case it looks like they don't have product ready and we're all out here hanging in the wind," Corn said.

"And to do this to the channel? Well, we're the ones who really brought AMD back with Opteron in the first place. They ought to think twice about what they're doing here."

With additional reporting by Jennifer Lawinski