Erratum degrades Phenom 9500, 9600 performance

We reported earlier today that a problem with AMD's quad-core processors has limited supply of "Barcelona" Opterons, but that is only part of the picture. Because the hardware bug--known as an erratum--affects all revisions and clock speeds of AMD's quad-core processors, it affects the newly introduced Phenom 9500 and 9600 processors, as well. And although AMD is no longer shipping quad-core Opterons to major server vendors and general customers, it is shipping Phenoms to large PC builders and distributors. In fact, AMD knew about the erratum before the Phenom product launch.