AMD is still talking about Milan-X I don’t see any upside in the Genoa schedule.
AMD, and to a lesser extent Intel, have always been willing to ship “risk” chips to customers who understand what exactly the risk is. Recently, on the AMD side anyway, the risk has been with the BIOS, not any serious chip errata.
You have to remember that my experience was in a bleeding-edge Air Force lab where we got ‘EC’ engineering samples up to two years before that chip became a product.
Let me describe the situation back then. There was the SIPRnet. (Stands for Secret Internet Protocol Routed network. All of the SIPRnet nodes were behind encryption devices that used random numbers thousands of digits long to encode the traffic. Many allies have SIPRnet access. If a document or a directory is marked as NOFORN, they just don’t see it.
Eventually, there was a TS (Top Secret) net on top of SIPRnet, but that is sort of irrelevant. However, GCSS running on top of SIPRnet, managed all logistics and personnel movements. Want to send a division to Iraq? Invasion or friendly move? In either case, GCSS would take a large movement and break it down into “frag” orders, which might move one plane, one tank, or even one individual. The important part of the system was that it made sure that there was enough fuel for that tank at that location, or to refuel that airplane, etc.
The servers were all Sun Microsystems machines. But obviously, there was a need for thousands of PCs to serve as clients so those frag orders could get quickly printed and distributed.
I didn’t do much on the PC side–a lab with a dozen or more Sun machines running Solaris kept me busy. But on either side of the lab, we needed to get software and hardware early so we could have a secure version of Windows on that new hardware when the new hardware went out to Air Force bases around the globe. We supported the Air Force, I assume there were similar facilities for the Army and Navy. Marines, Coast Guard, and others? I have no clue–but we supported the SOC.
So now you know why I’m used to having hardware in hand up way before it was announced.