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AMDZone has some info for us, which gives some reasons why AMD has delayed the Hammer. Click read more to view them...
Reasons for Hammer delay
Hammer's layout need to redesign. The old design cannot reach competitive speed at introduction. Need to add one extra layer of metal, just like Tbred-B. A new layout revision takes time.
SOI process is not as stable as expected. The yield is still poor and volume production is still a very challeging task. AMD process people is improving SOI process but this is not easy. Even IBM still has problems with SOI but IBM can afford to have a low yield with high-end Power4 unlike AMD where cost is a major concern. The nice thing is AMD already has a non-SOI backup plan in case SOI doesn't deliver the promise.
Integrated memory controller has proven to be a two-edge sword. It does improve performance by 10-20% compared with the same frequency CPU without independent memory controller. However, the integrated memory controller make the CPU less scalable (in term of frequency). Also current design have some stabability issues when performing at high frequency, but new a revision is in progress and hopefully can fix these issues.
realistically Hammer will not become widely available until early or mid Q2. If non-SOI version is required then it will be further delayed until late Q2.
We dont know for sure if this is true, but it looks good to me!
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