Shanghai, Advanced Micro Devices' next-generation processor, is being released ahead of schedule and, the company says, minus the mistakes of its last generation, Barcelona.
"Originally the plan was that Shanghai would launch in Q1 of '09 and we were able to pull that into Q4," stated Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business. He added that the product will not only be announced in the fourth quarter but vendors will also be shipping servers in the fourth quarter that feature Shanghai.
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Shanghai is a quad-core product targeted at servers and will be AMD's first 45-nanometer processor, whereas Barcelona was 65-nanometer. Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip. Intel has been shipping 45-nanometer processors since last year and these processors now make up most of Intel's offerings.
AMD is also boosting the size of the cache memory, which typically speeds performance, from two megabytes to six megabytes. Another speed improvement will come from increasing "instructions per clock." Shanghai will also feature HyperTransport 3, a high-speed communication link technology between silicon.
AMD's predecessor to Shanghai, the Barcelona, was released last September after being delayed for eight months due to production glitches and bugs. The chip was also hampered by speed (core clock frequency) limitations, giving Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.
"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," said Patla.
Michelle Warren, president of MW Research and Consulting, added that no such quality issues will happen with Shanghai.
"We have to wait until it is closer to ship date to give a definitive answer [but] it strongly looks like [AMD] is going to release a high quality product that addresses power and cooling and offer both server manufacturers and users a viable option compared to Intel," said Warren.
She added that Shanghai should help AMD compete against Intel's Nehalem that is coming down the pipeline.
"It would really help as AMD used to be strong on the server side and they have to regain some recognition that they are a force to be reckoned with in the server space. The market needs a good server product to come out from AMD," Warren noted.
She also said that the Shanghai release date being pulled in will end up being pretty good for Intel as the competition gives Intel the impetus to develop a really good product quickly.
The release of Shanghai at the end of year will also be beneficial, said Warren, as it gives resellers an opportunity to test the product and to get it working well in order to sell its features to customers.
Shanghai will be followed by a 45-nanometer desktop processor code-named Deneb, which is due to launch in the fourth quarter of this year or first quarter of 2009, AMD said. In the fourth quarter of 2009, AMD will add a six-core processor called Istanbul, which will be targeted at servers with up to eight processor sockets.
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BY Vanessa Ho
Source：eChannelLine
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