Chicago (IL) – AMD is ready to jump into the 45 nm arena: According to Digitimes, AMD will launch nine 45 nm Shanghai quad-core Opteron processors in October and address the mid- and high-performance range of the 2-way and 8-way segment first. Low-power versions are scheduled to follow in 2009.
We have seen AMD its marketing efforts surrounding its first 45 nm processors over the past few weeks. Digitimes today followed up with an “industry sources” article, which claims that the launch of the 45 nm quad-core Opterons with Shanghai core is imminent and should take place this month.
Apparently, AMD will focus initially on the mid-performance range initially, meaning that we should expect processors with an “average power consumption” (ACP) of 75 watts. According to Digitimes, the clock speeds will range from 2.3 to 2.7 GHz, which compares to 1.7 GHz to 2.5 GHz of the 65 nm quad-core Opterons with Barcelona core. There will be five 2-way (2000 series) and four 8-way (8000-series) 45 nm Opterons.
Low-power (55 watt ACP) Shanghai will follow in January, with three 2-way and two 8-way CPUs. The company also plans to release two high-performance (105 watt ACP) processors – one 2-way and one 8-way, Digitimes said.
AMD quite apparently has pulled in the launch of its Shanghai processor at least one full month, which probably has been motivated by Intel’s strong showing in the 2-way and 8-way segments. If Shanghai in fact is as good as AMD claims it is, then Shanghai really is what Barcelona should have been: While Barcelona, the company’s first quad-core processor, had a disastrous launch caused by the now famous TLB bug, the processor never was able to entirely regain the trust of system builders out there. Shanghai shapes up to be a different beast and provided AMD will not encounter another bug or manufacturing problems, it has all the genes necessary to increase AMD’s traction in the server market.
AMD even claims that high-performance versions of Shanghai will be able to match the performance of Intel’s 6-core Dunnington processors, which, of course, remains to be seen.
An interesting side note is that all new Shanghai processors will integrate support for Hypertransport 3.1 (HT3.1), which offers a bandwidth of 5.2 GTransfers per second, which more than triples the bandwidth of the previous Hypertransport spec (1.6 GTransfers per second). However, it appears that HT3.1 seems to be deactivated in those CPUs and only Hypertransport 1.0 will be support. According to Digitimes, Shanghai processors supporting HT3X will be introduced in the second quarter of 2009.