When AMD have setbacks then it’s usually not a good sign for the chipmaker that’s currently struggling to stay anywhere near Intel and not lose any more ground to them. The news today is that AMD appear to have a setback, in that they’ve shelved development of the 45nm-based Fusion processor, putting its release date back to 2011, if they actually do develop it at all, from the original release schedule of 2010.

There are several ways of looking at this: The main one being ‘better late and working than early and a fiasco’, a fiasco as occurred with the initial release of the Phenom, which subsequently allowed Intel to surge ahead and lengthen their lead.

Right now, AMD are seemingly the underdogs by a huge margin: Intel are rolling in money and surging ahead, while AMD are in debt and still playing catchup after their Phenom farce: A development marketed with best intentions using a new core architecture technology that emptied their coffers whilst on development and when the release date came there was just that one bug that needed to be ironed out. Naturally, when Intel replied by stapling 2 dual-core dies together, upping the architecture, and selling it at an increased price compared to AMD’s offering, everybody bought Intel’s product without any bugs in it. AMD were left behind to pick up the pieces and try to fathom out what went wrong while Intel; loaded with the proceeds from their victory, developed better, faster, offerings.

AMD’s senior vice president Randy Allen said at today’s launch of AMD’s 45nm Shanghai-cored Opteron processor that it was "the best server processor on the planet". – A side swipe at Intel who had said that their new Core i7 is the ‘fastest processor on the planet’.

Fusion was originally scheduled for 2009, but now appears to have effectively been cancelled according to some commentators. If that is the case than that is a setback; because if Intel produce 32nm processors in 2009 then AMD have their work cut out for them and won’t be able to catch up until at least 2011 by all analyses.

AMD aren’t finished yet though; so don’t go writing them off just yet as they live to fight another day. Do you agree?