AMD's Rivas On Barcelona Bug's Channel Impact

What I can tell you is that the fix involves for the most part just the top layers. We held material that I believe is first metal. And then we are doing the fix with the layers that are left over, since we have eleven layers of metal, we have quite a bit of play. It takes us in the mask and it's going to start running at the factory. We will get samples of the device in the January timeframe, but then we need to do our own validation because if we just assembled them and shipped them prematurely and there is another big bug, the tempest of press that we have right now would get even worse. We're going to go through a very rigorous verification process and then hit the market with samples. And once customers validate them themselves, then we will pursue shipping in mass.

In hindsight, with this kind of more cautious approach that you seem to be taking now, do you wish that the Barcelona launch back in September hadn't been quite so splashy and raised expectations with the arrival of this game-changing chip that has actually not shown up this year?

Hindsight is always 20/20, right? On the positive side, we do have installations of Barcelona, so it did show this year. Now if I was to do it all over again, I have to tell you, with the data I had at the time, I would make the same decision again. With the data I have now, clearly, that was a stupid decision. But with the data I had that day, it was the right decision.

Phenom is shipping now, and it's got the workaround in place. To what level does that workaround affect performance on Phenom specifically, and will future editions of Phenom be corrected at the design level in the same manner that Barcelona will be?

I'll answer the second part of your question first. Yes, it will be corrected.* You have to remember, too, that the Phenom parts that we launched were really targeted at the mainstream computer user and not the enthusiast guys. So the mainstream computer user really isn't going to notice any impact. It all depends on the workload, obviously. But to touch the workloads they're running, they aren't going to really notice this.

Although the whole Spider platform is aimed at the enthusiast.

Yes, we need the higher speed and bigger performance, and so it's a similar problem to the Opteron device ...

So does this hold up Spider in a sense?

No, when you look at Spider, and what we're trying to tell the world, is that performance is not limited to the processor. We're looking at a platform and the fact that we have, the technical term is 'kick ass graphics.' A lot of the applications that enthusiasts are running require heavy duty graphical computational power, which makes it less degraded than if you just have the GPU. Is it ideal? Again, I'm not going to be tell you that we are happy just shipping those speeds. I would love to be shipping a 2.6GHz part. But I know that we can overclock it in the labs, we can get it to 3.0 and in some cases with cooling we can get it to 4.0GHz, so least I feel comfortable that the design at least is capable of doing it. But you know that demos are not difficult to do. It's getting the thing into production in a consistent manner that's more difficult to do. But I feel pretty good about the circuitry overall. And once we have this last bug -- well, there's no such thing as a 'last bug' -- once we have this latest bug corrected, we are in business.

It's been a rough year for AMD. What can you say to channel partners, what can you say to investors about this situation moving forward, and finally, you know, are there going to be changes at AMD that we're going to see in the coming months?

Are there going to be changes? Man, that's a loaded question. Well, the one thing I will say is that if you look at our financials for Q1 2007, it's a disastrous Q1. But you will see that we make very good progress from Q1 to Q2, and from Q2 to Q3. And it's my intent that we continue the ride into Q4 and carry it into next year. And we did it without the benefit of the new products. What we expect is when we get the quad-core in volume out there, we'll get another lift. We'll all be dancing to 'Men in Black'. Do I think there are going to be changes? That's up to the board of directors to decide. We serve at their pleasure. They serve at the pleasure of the shareholders.

Because the speculation about this whole situation is so rampant, I've even seen that people are speculating that your 45nm process isn't on target. Can you address that a little bit?

I can tell you what I know. We have 45nm on the way. We will have initial samples also in January. I'm fairly confident that those puppies are going to boot, and then we can have a follow-up conference call and I'll tell you, 'The sucker is booting.' The 45nm, we consider it Rev C of the device. So all the learning, all the hard knocks that we had on Barcelona, we're going to apply it to Shanghai. I just read on Friday, I have to admit to my delight because misery loves company, that our competitor's 45nm part seems to be delayed too. So, errata. And it happens, because these are advanced products, right? So, test vehicles so far on 45nm look good. That's why my confidence level of being able to say generally that we'll have silicon on 45nm is pretty high. We also have 32nm advance work in SRAMs, which as you know is the initial step. So we will be a fast follower again, and as long as we have architectural advantage, our 45nm will be as good as the other guy's 32nm.

There's an analyst meeting in New York coming up Thursday. Do you think there's going to be some tough questions?

I think you've asked some tough questions already. I mean, they're going to ask me the same questions you're asking. Which is, allow me to paraphrase, 'What the hell were you guys doing in 2007?' And I just tried to take you through what we did.

One final question -- was there ever any consideration, once you found out about the problems with Barcelona, of shipping it anyway?

No. Once we determined that this problem could be found in a real situation, we said, 'We need to tell our partners.' At no point did we say, let's hide this and hope nobody finds out. So again, I want to say to the guys in the channel, when I took over the job a year ago, in my first public statement, when they asked, 'What do you need to do to get back in the saddle?' I said, 'We need to love our channel,' and I stand by it.

*Updated Dec. 11 at 6:40 PM EST to remove a factual misstatement.