Ashlee Vance over at The Register is reporting a bad spot of news for IBM. Apparently Cray isn’t the only partner that’s been burned by AMD’s delivery problems.
The benchmark gurus at SPEC (the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.) insist that vendors be able to ship their gear within 90 days of issuing a fresh test score. IBM apparently saw that it would fail to meet this requirement because of a lack of 1.9GHz chips, even though it had 90 days from Sept. 10 to find the chips. It needs more Opterons to perform benchmark tests and to pump out gear to consumers. And the 1.9Ghz chips are the slowest – and allegedly most plentiful – standard four-core parts AMD has to offer.(There are slower low voltage chips.)
…AMD has admitted some constraint around supply with the four-core Opterons, but if IBM can’t get enough of even the slowest, volume chips, then who can?
Other than Sun, of course, for the TACC cluster.