Devoted to hardware, software, IT issues, and information technology management

It's no secret that competition between software or hardware vendors is great for the business and for the customers.  It guarantees that a company won't sit on their laurels, will continue to improve their product lines and offer new products/services.  The competition also ensures that customers have choices when it comes to selecting hardware or software best suited to meet their needs and budget.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has been the 800 pound Gorilla in the x86 processor market for quite some time.  There have been some competitors, but until AMD (NYSE: AMD) entered the fray, no one had really challenged Intel.  When large hardware vendors, such as HP, started offering Opteron-based servers, I couldn't have been more pleased with an alternative to Intel and from everything I had heard about AMD's HyperTransport, a better performing alternative at that.

Once AMD started offering their dual-core processor in early 2005 it seemed as if they were poised to replace Intel as the leader in this market, but they seem to have stumbled somewhere along the way.  Intel was first to market with their quad-core processor (albeit not a "native" quad-core) and now we're hearing rumblings that the much-awaited quad-core Opteron processor from AMD, code-named Barcelona, is very difficult to obtain.

AMD announced the arrival of their quad-core Opteron processor, targeted for server-class hardware, in September and even though they appear to have delivered on key technical claims, such as superior performance-per-watt or ease of exchange with dual-core Opterons; there doesn't seem to be enough of them to go around.

Many channel partners have complained that the high-performance computing vendors are getting them first, reinforcing AMD's claims having shipped thousands of units so far, but denying they've halted shipping to a larger audience to deal with a bug in the processor.

When can the rest of us, who aren't doing any supercomputing, expect to see Barcelona offered in our Dell, HP, IBM, Sun or whitebox server gear?  Can AMD regain their footing against Intel?  I haven't seen any performance comparisons between the Intel Core 2 Quad and AMD's Opteron Quad, but would expect the Opteron native (four cores on a single piece of silicon) quad-core to outperform the Intel offering.  Can anyone out there comment on any performance statistics?