Advanced Micro Devices on Friday admitted that it would only begin shipments of products made using 45nm process technology in the fourth quarter of the year. This is a delay from the original schedule to start “volume” production by mid-2008, besides it also means that AMD will have uneasy times delivering better products to the market in Q2 and Q3, 2008.

“We’ll start the production ramp in the summertime and start to ship products in volume in Q4 2008,” said Dirk Meyer, president and chief operating officer at AMD during a conference call with financial analysts.

Back in mid-2006 another high-ranking executive at AMD – Daryl Ostrander, senior vice president and manufacturing and technology, showcased a presentation to investors and financial analysts where he indicated that AMD’s Fab 36 was on-track for volume 45nm production by mid-2008, one and a half years after 65nm and about half a year later than Intel Corp., which started revenue shipments of 45nm products in late 2007.

Historically AMD came with new process technologies about a year later than Intel, but in many cases it did not have any problems with that: the company had superior processor micro-architecture at the days of 130nm, 90nm and 65nm nodes and could offer higher-performance products despite of relatively outdated process technology. But these days AMD cannot boast with clearly superior products and it crucially needs to transit its quad-core AMD Opteron and AMD Phenom processors to thinner process technology to boost performance. Without higher speed products the world’s second largest maker of x86 central processing unit will continue to suffer from pressure of Intel’s superior processor family particularly in Q2 and Q3 2008.

Besides revealing information about the start of volume shipments of the first-generation 45nm products, AMD also said that its next-generation G3 server platform along with octa-core chip code-named Montreal is scheduled to be released in late 2009 or even early 2010.

“We’ll be introducing a new [server] platform architecture later 2009, early 2010,” Mr. Meyer said.

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