After years of inconsistency in delivering chips on time, AMD got back on track in the chip space this year, fixing bugs, releasing the Barcelona server chip and rolling out its Shanghai server chip ahead of schedule. It also revealed a consumer-chip road map late in the year to create excitement around its new products.

But in the new road map, the company revealed that it had delayed the launch of its much-awaited Fusion family of chips, which would combine a graphics processing unit and CPU on a single chip. That impacted PC makers and consumers, who were eagerly awaiting the release of the breakthrough chip.

The CPU and GPU components will now be combined in chips code-named Llano and Ontario, which will be released in 2011. The company will get better economies of scale and power savings from the chips manufactured using the 32-nm process.

AMD may have delayed the 45-nanometer chips because it didn't foresee the design challenges, said Rob Lineback, senior market research analyst at IC Insights.

"AMD clearly faced technical and economic challenges in combining central processing units with graphics units at the current 45-nanometer process generation," Lineback said.