It sucks to be AMD

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Brooke Crothers over at c|net Blogs posted yesterday about another pearl in AMD’s bag of sorrow, this time caused by some bad communication with manufacturers using their new Phenom chip

AMD logoAMD confirmed Monday that some motherboard suppliers are mismatching high-end quad-core Phenom processors with a lower-end chipset.

…”They’ve taken an enthusiast-class quad-core part and paired it with a mainstream motherboard,” Whitman said. “And not all motherboard manufacturers have tweaked their boards to support a 125-watt TDP [ed: Thermal Design Power].” Whitman says that AMD’s 790 chipset–not the 780–should be paired with the 9750 and 9850 processors and that a number of motherboard makers are already doing this.

I’ll grant that this one doesn’t appear to the be the fault of AMD’s engineering or manufacturing teams, but certainly some component of AMD’s channel communications program appears to be broken. They just can’t catch a break.