<span class="content"><font size="2">Today, AMD releases their new 45nm Opterons, codenamed <em>Shanghai.</em> It's been a very quiet year for AMD on the server front, after a fairly rough launch of <em>Barcelona</em>, but AMD hopes to regain consumer confidence and earn back some market share from Intel.</font> <p><strong><font size="2">A little history</font></strong></p> <p><font size="2"><em>Barcelona</em> was AMD's first product based on their monolithic quad-core design, which was a very different path from what Intel decided to take. Intel decided effectively to join two dual-core CPUs at the hip to make their quad-core product. <em>Barcelona</em> was not a smooth launch. Hindered by CPU design issues and supply problems, it was one of the worst launches we've seen from AMD. However, today is a new day, a new part, and hopefully new customers.</font></p> <p><font size="2"><em>Shanghai</em> is an update to the <em>Barcelona</em> architecture, which means it is socket compatible and should be a drop-in replacement in servers that have a BIOS update that supports <em>Shanghai.</em> Something that some people might not realize is that AMD uses the same core product in their 2P, 4P, and 8P product lines. This may not matter to everyone, but it makes the life of OEMs a little easier. Besides the various tweaks to the <em>Barcelona</em> architecture, <em>Shanghai</em> is also a die shrink to 45nm. As AMD has already revealed in their 2009/2010 roadmap, <em>Shanghai</em> will be with us until the end of 2009 as a quad-core chip, followed by a six-core product when AMD releases <em>Istanbul.</em><br /> <br /> All of the <em>Shanghai</em> parts that release this year will be 75W versions, ranging from 2.3 to 2.7GHz. In Q1 of 2009, AMD expects to release HE (55W) models as well as SE (105W) models. Another change that's coming next year is the move to HyperTransport 3.0, which will increase bandwidth by up to 17.6GB/s. We found it a bit odd that there will be effectively an update to the architecture to support this move, and that this feature didn't make this initial product release.<br /> <br /> <a href="http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3456">Read more...</a><br /> <br /> </font></p> <p><!-- google_ad_section_end --><font size="2"></font></p> </span>