It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything on Barcelona from AMD, the quad-core platform that they launched back in September. Though AMD announced that they would ship nine different versions of the chip, topping off at 2.0Ghz with the top-of-the-line Opteron 8350, Barcelona CPUs of all stripes have proven hard to come by in the retail channel. Word on the street is that 1.7Ghz and 1.8Ghz parts have been showing up in Japan and some online retailers in the States have been stocking the 1.7Ghz part. Granted, this isn’t completely surprising, as AMD had publicly stated that Barcelona wouldn’t reach widespread availability until the middle of the fourth quarter. Still, AMD fans should probably be a little bit concerned that the company can’t ramp up production for its 2.0Ghz part–especially because AMD claims that it will debut 2.2Ghz and 2.4Ghz parts in November.

For more on Barcelona:
– see this Ars Technica article