Widespread availability of AMD’s energy-efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor a.k.a. Barcelona for computer servers has been delayed yet again because of a technical glitch.

Barcelona has been in limited availability since September this year.

Because of the glitch, widespread availability of the Barcelona chip has now been pushed back to early next year. The chip was originally scheduled to move into general availability in mid-2007.

Barcelona took over three years to develop and is the first native x86 quad-core processor on a single piece of silicon.

Intel, which already offers the quad-core Xeon processors, took a different and easier route with its quad-core processors by packaging together two dual-core processors.