Want to buy an e-reader from Plastic Logic? You will have to wait until “sometime this summer.” Want to buy the whole company? That’s a different story.

That’s the message U.K. investor Hermann Hauser is delivering via the Financial Times (via Engadget). Hauser, who owns a chunk of Plastic Logic via his Amadeus Capital Partners, doesn’t come out and say the company is for sale. But he spends a chunk of the story explaining why someone would be smart to take the investment off his hands.

Why would that be? Plastic Logic, after all, has been in the e-reader business for years, but has yet to actually start selling one. It finally showed off its Que Reader in January and promised delivery in April. But last month, the company told customers the Que would be delayed until summer–practically daring them to buy a competing product from Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Sony (SNE) or Barnes and Noble (BKS).

Hauser’s pitch: Plastic Logic is a technology company whose real value is the plastic chips that power the Que.

“Plastic Logic is using the simplest invention in plastic electronics, a single transistor that switches a particular pixel on or off,” says Mr Hauser. The real potential, he explains, is in creating plastic integrated circuits capable of complex functions, a feat that Plastic Logic co-founder Henning Sirringhaus has just achieved. Mr Hauser says: “Plastic electronics will spawn dozens of companies taking advantage of different aspects of integrated circuits in the same way that silicon has.”

How much is that worth? The FT helpfully suggests a buyer should pony up a multiple of the $200 million Hauser and others have bet on the company. But if that’s above your spending limit, you should be able to get a Que for less than $800 in a couple months.

Uncrated at an event in San Francisco Wednesday, the next-generation chip boasts approximately 10 to 20 times the processing power found inside current Intel (INTC) “Core” CPUs. And it can operate on as little as 25 watts, or at 125 watts when running at maximum performance–about the amount of energy consumed by two household light bulbs.

“With a chip like this, you could imagine a cloud datacenter of the future which will be an order of magnitude more energy efficient than what exists today, saving significant resources on space and power costs,” said Justin Rattner, head of Intel Labs and Intel’s chief technology officer. “Over time, I expect these advanced concepts to find their way into mainstream devices.”

But not yet. Right now, Intel is giving the chips to a few select research partners, who will use them to develop new software applications and programming models for future multicore processors. Said Ratner, “This is not a product. It never will be a product. But it provides a very good platform for conducting research.”

The new server chip, which puts four processors on a single silicon die, is the first of its kind and AMD’s shot at regaining some of the market its lost to a resurgent Intel. The company’s market share was about 25% in the middle of 2006. By mid-2007, it had slipped to close to 13%. “There is nothing that we would have been more excited about than getting it out earlier,” AMD CEO Hector Ruiz told eWeek. “But you know we are not making excuses. This is a damn difficult thing to do, as I’m sure you can imagine. …This is 600 million transistors on a chip, four cores, complex technology and tremendous architectural features. It was, frankly, a little tougher challenge than we had anticipated and it frustrated the hell out of us because we wanted to get it out there earlier.”

Of course you did. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron arrives at market nearly a year after Intel began shipping quad-core processors of its own and follows a string of consecutive quarterly losses. The stakes here have been high for quite a while. But is the quad-core Opteron the winning hand for which AMD hopes? Perhaps. Perhaps not. “Barcelona is not the sweeping challenge to Intel they wanted to make,” analyst Rob Enderle told the Austin American Statesman. “This keeps them in the game and competing. But it’s not a leadership position.”

Certainly, Intel doesn’t think so. This morning the company announced that it now expects third quarter revenue to be between $9.4 billion and $9.8 billion, improving on its previous guidance of $9 billion to $9.6 billion.