China decided to upgrade its Dawning 4000A racks and made a massive order for an undisclosed number of 2.3 GHz quad-core Opteron processors (Barcelona) to break the 200 TFlops peak performance barrier (the Tata system has a peak performance of 170.9 TFlops). AMD gave these processors away for $1 a piece (don’t feel too bad, if you have paid more, Intel apparently does that all the time as well and even gave away free Itanium 2 processors to get a F1 supercomputer deal). We don’t know how many processors were shipped, but we do know that the guys at the SSC were somewhat surprised to find that they received 1.9 GHz and not the 2.3 GHz CPUs they were expecting - which meant that they would miss the targeted performance goal for the upgraded system. Our sources indicate that AMD APAC was expected to pay for all the additional racks that the SSC needed to reach the target and, additionally, AMD spent more than $1 million on lab facilities, which could be considered some sort of compensation for the miss.