The first B3 steppings of AMD’s Opteron processors have finally made their way out into the hand of customers according to this report at Dailytech.  There still isn’t any word on when these will start shipping in volume or when the consumers will begin seeing B3 stepping Phenom processors or when we’ll get clock speeds to ramp up competitiveness to Intel’s parts. 
AMD made it virtually impossible to obtain any K10-based Opteron processors after the TLB bug caught the world’s attention last December.  Desktop Phenom processors continued to ship, though the BIOS workaround for the TLB race condition severely hampered performance on some benchmarks.

The vendor who obtained the B3 sample photographed (right) couldn’t be more ecstatic.  “There’s been no Opterons since November.  We’ve even been shipping Socket F Opterons to fill AMD orders.   This is a big deal,” he tells DailyTech.

“Pre-production” Opterons sent to Torrent search engine IsoHunt last February were later revealed as gray-market B2 stepped processors, which AMD tracked to October 2007 samples.

In addition to fixing the TLB race condition, AMD will finally increase the core frequency of the Opteron series on the B3 stepping.  After the initial OEM orders are filled, channel vendors like Newegg and TigerDirect will carry the new Opterons in frequencies ranging from 1.8 GHz to 2.4 GHz.  Vendor estimates put this e-tailer ship date in early April.