Llano Production Shortages May Be Over for AMD, Says Analyst

Ever since AMD has released its first A-Series APUs based on the Llano architecture, the chip maker has been facing production shortages that affected the market availability of these processors, but an analyst believes that these troubles are now over for AMD.

What makes the analyst believe that the shortage may be over is the fact that AMD has recently announced a new series of APUs that feature slightly higher operating frequencies than the parts they will replace.

"The new parts are basically speed bumps, and I am taking the fact AMD can ship faster versions of A-series chips as an indicator they may be able to improve their availability," said Nathan Brookwood, principal of Insight64 who was cited by EETimes.

"Retailers such as Newegg and Amazon couldn’t get their hands on early versions of the chips because they were so production constrained," continued the analyst.

The A-Series APU shortages that have been affecting AMD in these last few months were caused by GlobalFoundries since the latter has struggled to get its 32nm yields at the levels that AMD required it to.

GloFlo’s performance made Thomas Seifert, CFO and former interim CEO of AMD, comment at the end of September:

"Performance is not where it needs to be and we are driving them very hard to where we need them to be in order to continue to grow this partnership," concluded the company's rep.

Despite the improvements in chip production that Brookwood has mentioned, the analyst still believes that the competitive stance between AMD and Intel remains unchanged.

"Anyone focused on x86 performance at a given price point may find the Intel Sandy Bridge CPU cores outperform the AMD Llano cores which are the K10 cores that have been an AMD workhorse for a decade," said Brookwood.

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