The desktop version of Hammer, which is code-named Clawhammer and will be marketed under the Athlon brand name, will ship to PC manufacturers in the first quarter of 2003 and will hit store shelves toward the end of that quarter or at the beginning of the next, said John Crank, senior branding associate at AMD.
Earlier, AMD planned to ship Clawhammer to manufacturers by the end of the fourth quarter of this year and have it on store shelves in the first quarter of 2003.
Opteron, a version of Hammer for servers, will keep to its scheduled release in the first half of next year.
The delay on Clawhammer, which was originally slated to come out in the first quarter of 2002, will heat up the competitive atmosphere of the microprocessor market in 2003.
AMD has stated that Clawhammer will outperform Intel's best chips and pave the way for AMD to get its processors into the corporate environment. The holdup, though, could erode any performance advantages to Clawhammer, especially as Intel has encountered few problems in ratcheting up the speed of its chips in the past year.
"AMD was counting on Clawhammer to put some distance in terms of performance with Intel," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64. "It is going to be a closer horse race than it was supposed to be."
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