AMD's Six-Core Istanbul Opterons

EconolineCrush writes "AMD's latest 'Istanbul' Opterons add two cores per socket, for a grand total of six. Despite the extra cores, these new chips reside within the same power envelope as existing quad-core Opterons, and they're drop-in compatible with current systems. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the new chips, comparing their performance and power efficiency with that of Intel's Nehalem-based Xeons. Istanbul fares surprisingly well, particularly when one considers its performance-power ratio with highly parallelized workloads."

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Scary Quote from the Article

[Gazzonyx]

[...] Not only that, but it's hitting the market early. AMD had originally planned to introduce this product in the October time frame, but the first spin of Istanbul silicon came back solid, so the firm pulled the launch forward into June. Even with the accelerated schedule, of course, Istanbul comes not a moment too soon, now that Nehalem Xeons are out in the wild.

Does anyone else think that this seems a little convenient? I'm really hoping that they didn't just tone down the testing to make it to market. I'm thinking they'll go to market and then quickly release a new revision to fix the corners that they cut the first time around. I hope I'm wrong, but AMD has been slipping lately.

Any EE's out there know the process well enough to confirm or deny my suspicions?