AMD seeks redemption with 'Shanghai' chip
Let bygones be bygones. That's what Advanced Micro Devices is hoping for with the roll-out of its first 45-nanometer processor Thursday.
(AMD also announced its upcoming 45-nanometer "Phenom II X4" desktop technology. See below.)
The No. 2 PC processor supplier will make the case that Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip--AMD's first quad-core processor--was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare but then faced prolonged delays. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market. (AMD lost more than five percentage points to Intel in the server market during the third quarter of this year, according to various reports.)
AMD Shanghai die
"Barcelona was obviously a pretty rough start for them. And that does not appear to be the case for Shanghai," said Dean McCarron, the principal and founder of Mercury Research, a company that tracks chip market movements. "One of the big distinctions was they wanted to be absolutely sure that Shanghai was ready to go."
Shanghai is not a new architecture but essentially a refresh of AMD's Barcelona Opteron chip. AMD claims Shanghai is 35 percent faster than Barcelona without using more energy. The chip is being built on 45-nanometer process technology, while Barcelona was a 65-nanometer part. Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the processor.
Major customers are brimming with accolades for Shanghai. "We've been very pleased. Thrilled with their execution," said with Paul Gottsegen, vice president of Industry Standard Servers, HP, in an interview.
"We'll have products that will be shipping just after launch. We had high performance expectations for the product and it exceeded our expectations," he said. "We're going to put Shanghai across the meat of our product line. You'll see six different rack servers, three different blades, all up and down parts of our product line."
And HP likes the fact that Shanghai is more power efficient, a critical metric for many server applications. "We're seeing a significantly higher performance-per-watt over previous-generation AMD," Gottsegen said.
HP would not comment on AMD's checkered quad-core past. In response to a question about drawing a comparison with AMD's Barcelona launch last September and Shanghai, Gottsegen would not comment. "This is their Shanghai launch. I want to focus on Shanghai," he said.
Cray is also expected to use Shanghai in its supercomputers, according to AMD.
Both HP and Dell are targeting Shanghai processors specifically for virtualization, which allows a data center to reduce the number of physical servers. Shanghai has a silicon "assist" that facilitates virtualization.
Praise from vendors doesn't necessarily translate into market success, however. Especially when the market is going south in a hurry. "We have a demand-falling-off-the-cliff scenario," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart.
"Shanghai, which in a normal environment may have had a window of opportunity, it's not likely to do so today," Kumar said. "By the time demand recovers in the second half of next year, Intel will be fielding their (next-generation) Nehalem product," Kumar added, referring to Intel's server version of the Nehalem processor.
Shanghai Opteron processors are available immediately, the company said. The 75-watt versions of the processor range from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz in clock speed. Enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors are planned for the first quarter of 2009, AMD said.
Shanghai technology ahead of Intel
Much of Shanghai's raw technology is a generation ahead of Intel. In a posting at EE Times, Don Scansen, a semiconductor technology analyst at Semiconductor Insights, said that many of the features that Intel is touting as new are not new to AMD and were initially introduced in AMD's Barcelona processor.
"Intel's Nehalem is due out soon, but many of the features of what has widely been touted as a 'new' architecture are only new to Intel," he writes.
"There is no question that Intel is at the cutting edge of process (manufacturing) technology, but that's not true for architecture. Intel probably decided it made more sense to introduce a highly integrated, quad-core design on 45nm rather than 65nm just to keep the chip size down. Whatever the reasons, the introduction of Intel's Nehalem architecture will come more than a year later than AMD's Barcelona."
Scansen says that, among other things, AMD has reduced the "die footprint" (chip size) by more than 10 percent, despite doubling the total cache memory from 4MB to 8MB.
Upcoming 45nm desktop processors
AMD plans to bring Shanghai 45nm processor technology to the desktop PC market in Q1 2009 with a platform codenamed "Dragon."
"This platform will be the second-generation AMD performance desktop platform, featuring all next-generation components in comparison to the first-generation AMD 'Spider' platform released in 2008," AMD said in a statement.
The Dragon platform will combine 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with AMD 700 Series chipsets and ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics.
Brooke Crothers has served as an editor at large at CNET News, an editor at Dow Jones' Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, and a senior editor at InfoWorld. His CNET blog covers chip technology and computer systems, and how they define the computing experience. He also contributes to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. Follow Brooke on Twitter @mbrookec. 
Yeah, i hope amd put out some nice desktop cpu's. Thier main advantage is that it will run on a AM2+ socket, so even if the chips arn't as good at the i7's the savings in dr2 (instead of ddr3) and current vs new mobos could add up to near $500. If thier chips are somewhat competitve they will be a killer for midrange gamers who would rather buy a 4870x2 and get the fps up than have a $400 mobo.
Finally, I just overclocked my Q9660 from 2.4ghz to 3.04ghz without having to increase a single voltage or add any additional cooling by simply bumping the bus from 266mhz to 333mhz. AMD can't touch that and the 2.4ghz Q9660 was already faster than any Phenom X4.
yes AMD came up with it but Intel prefected it and wel look at AMD now...
dont get me wrong im not a fanboy for intel i just like them to make good products and keep them coming with new stuff each year.
- by 3rdalbum December 8, 2008 10:32 PM PST
- If the Phenom 2s are superior in performance to the Core 2 Quads, can use DDR2 memory and are cheaper than the Core i7s, then I'll be very seriously considering AMD for my next rig.
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(9 Comments)"Pins sticking out of the back is very poor design", lol. Haven't you seen the way that Intel CPU coolers connect to the motherboard? Little plastic clips that require scary amounts of force in order to secure. While AMD's coolers aren't hiding the best designed CPUs today, at least the coolers themselves can give you confidence.