San Francisco (CA) - AMD somewhat surprisingly confirmed in a conversation with Cnet’s Brooke Crothers that the company’s first 45 nm processor is in full production “right now”. First silicon from the production should be arriving at partners shortly, which would mean that the company can keep its promise to introduce the 45 nm Opteron, code-named “Shanghai” in Q4. A desktop version will follow with the usual delay of about 60 days.

---

---

Last year’s introduction of the 65 nm quad-core Opteron processor with Barcelona core, was not especially impressive. Initial delays were amplified through a TLB bug that sent shockwaves through the company and caused AMD to lose market share in the DP and MP server markets to Intel. Barcelona servers such as Sun’s M2 models arrived 8 months later than originally anticipated. According to an article published by Cnet, the 45 nm shrink, Shanghai is “ready to go” and will be available in product before the end of the year.



AMD claims that Shanghai will be about 20% faster than Barcelona at comparable clock speeds, it will offer three times the cache (6 MB instead of 2 MB) and support Hypertransport 3. AMD decided to roll out 45 nm with the higher-end, more profitable Opterons first and launch a 45 nm desktop CPU, code-named Deneb, with some distance. That distance is typically 60-90 days, but it appears that Deneb is prepped for a Q4 rollout as well. As it looks right now, Shanghai could be announced in October and Deneb a few weeks before Christmas.           

AMD told Cnet that the launch of the 45 nm Shanghai was pulled in from an originally scheduled Q1 2009, which, according to our sources, is due to a better than expected scaling of the CPU. However, AMD somewhat forgot to note that the introduction schedule was changed earlier this year. According to the company’s original 45 nm rollout schedule, Shanghai may actually be between three and six months late. Back in 2006, then president Dirk Meyer (and CEO today) promised journalists and analysts that AMD would cut the distance to Intel from 12 down to 6 months, while we now know that AMD really has not gained any ground.

When we recently asked AMD about this promise, we were told that AMD would cut the time distance to Intel with future process generations. We are left scratching our head over this one and wonder why AMD keeps stressing that their 45 nm chips are early, when, in fact, they are late. While we don’t care whether AMD is early or late as long as they have competitive CPUs, it just doesn’t look good making those “early” claims.

Shanghai will maintain an “average power consumption” 55, 75 and 105 watts and, according to the company, we should expect at least one Shanghai SKU to outperform Intel’s six-core Dunnington processor. AMD’s own six-core processor, code-named Istanbul (all AMD server and desktop processor code names follow the locations of Formula 1 race tracks), is promised to be introduced as a monolithic CPU in Q4 of 2009, also with an average power consumption of 55, 75 and 105 watts.      

Clock frequencies?

Sep 30, 2008 11:24     

Is there anybody that can give the clock frequencies?
Jose Croca report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

Deneb is already slated to arrive in frequencies of...

Sep 30, 2008 15:28     

Deneb is already slated to arrive in frequencies of 2.8 and 3.0 Ghz
West report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

Excellent...

Sep 30, 2008 17:09     

A 3 Ghz Deneb with a 790GX motherboard sounds like a rather attractive option... If they sell the 3Ghz Deneb at a reasonable price (ie, not like Intel charging insane amounts for any quad cores over about 2.6ghz) then we shall have some fantastic performance for relatively little money... I'm looking forward to it!
jo-mo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

About the Istanbul

Oct 01, 2008 03:19     

That image showing the die six-core Istanbul is artistic impression only. The original image (here: http://www.chip-architect.com/...tanbul.jpg) also showed that it's NOT a real die. [thank you for the note. We actually removed the image from our gallery. Anyone interested seeing the image, please click over to the site mentioned. -ed]
l report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

20% faster is slow

Oct 01, 2008 16:09     

AMD needs more creativity. It can't compete with a Core Q9300. They need to start thinking on deviating current instead of stoping it, to reduce overheating, and achieving higher gigahertz... Or extending the DDR concept to logic hardware. A transistor capable of swithching between 4 states (voltages) could replace 2 binary transistors in the same space, without need to make an entire factory for smaller nanometers.

mm report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -2

"We are left scratching our head over this one and ...

Oct 02, 2008 12:20     

"We are left scratching our head over this one and wonder why AMD keeps stressing that their 45 nm chips are early, when, in fact, they are late" They are early and late depending to what you are comparing it. We all know the delays AMD has had during the recent processors and even with deneb, but couple of weeks ago they announced it would be available in jan 2009. Things apparently went better than that so now it seems they can push it to the market during this year. That justifies them saying deneb is early. It is quite clear that tgdaily is fully aware of this but for some reason this misleading news is not edited.

Fuer Pesson report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

Deneb is both late and not

Oct 02, 2008 12:21     

"We are left scratching our head over this one and wonder why AMD keeps stressing that their 45 nm chips are early, when, in fact, they are late" They are early and late depending to what you are comparing it. We all know the delays AMD has had during the recent processors and even with deneb, but couple of weeks ago they announced it would be available in jan 2009. Things apparently went better than that so now it seems they can push it to the market during this year. That justifies them saying deneb is early. It is quite clear that tgdaily is fully aware of this but they are enough well paid to publish misleading news.

Fuer Pesson report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -1

20% or 35% ..

Oct 03, 2008 21:00     

Two days ago, the general manager of AMD’s server and workstation business told the news that Shanghai would give a 35% performance boost over Barcelona on average and also would reduce power consumption by 35%. If that's a true, which I doubt it, we would see a real killer this time. However, AMD had claimed in the past that Barcelona would outperform Clovertown by 40% and that's before they launched that buggy CPU, that claim turned out to be a joke anyway. Let's wait for the benchmark results, and please AMD officals, the shareholders are not that stupid anymore, GET SOMETHING REAL DONE BEFORE YOU SUNK YOUR DAMN SHIP.

Tracer report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0