keithlm :
Just to add perspective:
You say 10 days short of 2 months.
So you mean about 6 weeks; with two of those being major holiday weeks. SO really... about 4 weeks or 1 month.
(Which is the 1 month + change where all of the AMD hardware developers went on vacation since they'd been working hard on getting the release done.)
So a rational person wouldn't have expected any kind of fixes or updates until... about NOW.
And to add another perspective:
If your top of the line, newest architecture product is not performing even close to your competitors, you wouldn't let your engineers to go on vacation, would you? I mean, AMD spent roughly about 2 years, couple million dollars, and several PR disasters to produce this product. Currently, this product is not even performing close to AMD's claim, to public expectation, yet the hardware engineers get to take a break?
Not to mention, Phenom's competitor is outperforming it by a decent margin (IPC / clockspeed). How is Phenom going to compete, when it has no IPC advantage, no clockspeed advantage, no power efficiency advantage, no financial advantage, and no marketing advantage? I suppose AMD would just sell these babies at fall out price, just to make up the cost of manufacturing?
If you were Hector, given this situation, would you let anyone in your company take an extra week of rest?
Also in discussing that subject we have two issues: The chipset designed for the Phenom and the AM2 chipsets that are supposedly compatible.
One of these is very important. The other is only a minor concern; an added bonus.
I salute AMD for attempting to make their new chip backward compatible instead of just coming out with a new socket and saying "Sorry legacy folks". But most bios issues are motherboard hardware manufacturer issues.
(Just like Vista still has driver problems because device driver programmers didn't want to bother updating their drivers and actually following the rules of the operating system instead of bypassing it for their own personal optimizations.)
Its one thing to tout a feature, but its another to actually delivering it. Yes, I do applaud AMD's effort of making these CPUs compatible with older socket, but if the motherboard manufacturers delay on the BIOS development, then wouldn't it be just talk? Most, if not all, the motherboard manufacturers do not take those two weeks you mentioned off. This is similar to AMD's first claim of 40% performance improvement over its competition. Yes, I do applaud AMD for making the effort, but what's the use if they can't deliver it?
Now, the chipset designed for Phenom, the 790 series. I have no doubt it is a good chipset. This is probably the strongest link in the whole Spider platform. However, without Phenom being competitive, the whole platform is not competitive.