AMD Shanghai Ready To Go

AMD Shanghai Ready To Go

Ewigen Zyniker, Oct 01, 2008 0903 hrs IST

Hopes to make people forget about Barcelona

It hasn't been looking good for AMD recently. Much though we like watching the Green One light fires under Intel's hindquarters, the coming of the Core 2 and 45nm chips has given it plenty to worry about. As if that wasn't enough, its Barcelona chips--their best bet against Intel in the server market at the time--was fraught with production issues and bugs, giving Intel just the time they needed to pull up their server socks.

AMD now says that it's ready with Shanghai, the successor to Barcelona--finally using the faster, and more energy-efficient 45nm architecture. The Shanghai will also rectify the mistakes that Barcelona made, and will supposedly perform 20 percent better at the same speed. The new chip also boosts the cache from 2MB to a massive 6MB. Quality controls have been stringent, and the company has spared no effort in ensuring that customers get what they pay for. We don't need to tell you how badly AMD needs this win.

However, with Intel's 6-core Dunnington on its way, the server battle is just going to get more heated, what with AMD planning on a 6-core chip only in 2009.

Source: CNET