As the release of 45nm Opteron processors grows nearer, AMD executives are loosening their tongues and shedding more light on the upcoming chips. CNet has had a chat with AMD Server and Workstation General Manager Pat Patla, who painted an encouraging picture of the chipmaker's progress.
Speaking of Shanghai—the code name for 45nm Opterons—Patla said AMD is working hard not to repeat past mistakes: "We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible." To that end, a lead engineer oversees the Shanghai project and sets goals so that "the product that we put in the hands of our partners is going to be of substantial stability so they can do lots of early validation."
Patla hinted that Shanghai may zoom past Barcelona in benchmarks, too. He said the 45nm process yields "a lot more (clock) frequency," and at the same clock speed, Shanghai "will outperform Barcelona by about 20 percent." AMD's retail quad-core chips currently top out at 2.6GHz, so Patla's statements give weight to rumors of 45nm Phenoms clocked at up to 3GHz.
On the scheduling side of things, Patla said servers featuring 45nm Opterons will ship in the fourth quarter of this year. The schedule for 45nm Phenoms seems a little fuzzier, since AMD told CNet the chips will "launch in the fourth quarter of this year or first quarter of 2009." The rumor mill pins that launch in late December or early January.
Shanghai to have high clocks, performance, says AMD - The Tech Report
"Shanghai" is Ready to Rock says AMD
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AMD Shanghai hopes to erase bad memories of Barcelona
AMD has proven to be a tough opponent for Intel in the server processor marketplace. AMD said that its latest architecture dubbed Shanghai is now ready to go. Shanghai parts are quad-core processors that are targeted at the server market.
Shanghai is also AMD's first 45-nanometer processor. AMD's last big architecture aimed at the server marketplace was the Barcelona processor that ran into significant problems in the market. One of the biggest issues with Barcelona was that the processors were delayed for eight months after their introduction.
Once the processors were finally shipped and available, AMD had issues with the performance of the parts and the CPUs suffered from other glitches. AMD promises that Shanghai will not be another Barcelona.
Pat Patla, AMD server and workstation business general manager, told CNET News, "We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible. Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again."
To help ensure that Shanghai succeeds and offer users a better experience than Barcelona, AMD put one engineer in charge of the entire Shanghai project. Patla continued saying, "the product that we put in the hands of our partners is going to be of substantial stability so they can do lots of early validation."
To improve the performance of Shanghai over Barcelona, AMD is counting on several factors. First is the move from the 65nm process of Barcelona to the 45nm process used in Shanghai. This will allow for more efficiency and better performance than Barcelona.
AMD is also moving the cache memory from 2MB to 6MB to improve performance and it says that instructions per clock cycle will be increased as well. Shanghai will also utilize AMD's HyperTransport 3, which AMD expects to be validated in Q1 2009. A 45nm desktop Shanghai part will be offered in Q1 2009 according to CNET News.
DailyTech - "Shanghai" is Ready to Rock says AMD
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