Today, AMD releases their new 45nm Opterons, codenamed Shanghai. It's been a very quiet year for AMD on the server front, after a fairly rough launch of Barcelona, but AMD hopes to regain consumer confidence and earn back some market share from Intel.

A little history

Barcelona 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. Barcelona 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.

Shanghai is an update to the Barcelona architecture, which means it is socket compatible and should be a drop-in replacement in servers that have a BIOS update that supports Shanghai. 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 Barcelona architecture, Shanghai is also a die shrink to 45nm. As AMD has already revealed in their 2009/2010 roadmap, Shanghai will be with us until the end of 2009 as a quad-core chip, followed by a six-core product when AMD releases Istanbul. Shanghai will ship in several different clock speeds, listed below.

All of the Shanghai 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.