Comments on: AMD says new 'Shanghai' chip is ready to go

Shanghai--targeted at servers--will be AMD's first 45-nanometer processor. Company insists it won't make the same mistakes as it did with the Barcelona processor.

[The1egend]

Go AMD. Get back in the black, give Intel a run for it's money. There needs to be competition in the market, and better yet, hopefully in a few years AMD can come out with something that will outperform Intel again.

[bemenaker]

Nice to see AMD back in the game.

[fdunn3]

Intel is hard at work too, but it's good to see AMD coming back into the game.

[njk1]

Sweet, I want AMD back in the game and on top again.

[Zaunto]

It's time for AMD to get back in the game. If they can solidify their platform (CPU, 790Chipset, GPU) on all of their platforms, they could create some formidable competition for Intel.

[buggermenot]

We didn't see any benchmarks on this CPU.

[thelemurking]

I love the whole multicore idea, but what's the point of 4 and 6 cores when 99% of all applications aren't even optimized for dual core?

Granted you can manually go in and change the affinity of an app to work on an individual core, but isn't it about time that software catches up with the hardware?

Why not work at increasing speed, lowering power and heat on the dual/quad core chips before moving into the 6-8 cores?

[zboot]

Server applications are optimized for multiple processing units. Desktop apps are not. With computing moving more to the "cloud" and off our desktops and laptops, it makes business sense to focus on increasing the processing units per server while staying roughly within the same power budget.

[ltonnews]

"but what's the point of 4 and 6 cores when..."

Several reasons.

1. This is for servers ... not desktop applications. Server software does consume lots of processes and/or threads. If you dozens, hundreds, or thousands of users interacting with your sever there certainly not just one application running on one thread on that machine.

2. Virtualization. Just because these CPUs may be in one physical machine that doesn't mean that there will be one OS and mostly one application running on top. Again if you aggregated several users onto one machine can find a steady stream of workload.

In short. one of the limiting factor on desktop machines is that most users primarily engage in only one activity at a time. If you are talking the "average joe" desktop market then perhaps can get by with just duals.


"Why not work at increasing speed, lowering power and heat"

Again servers. There is huge momentum in virtualization. For virtualization servers you need a "bigger" machine in a smaller and more cost effective box. By the way the article does seem to indicate that get a increase in speed and probably get a lowering of power since .45. ( heat and power are pragmatically the same thing . ignoring how 'leaky' the circuits are.) If you can increase speed and increase cores why not?

[Imalittleteapot]

Software isn't optimized yet, but that doesn't mean they're not being modified at all. It takes a while because the hardware had to get in our hands before programmers can successfully write and test but they're already starting to take advantage. It's just a rumor that no one is working on it. Trust me there are people working really hard on it.

It won't take as long as you think. You don't have rewrite the software every time you double the cores. If you can write good multicore code it'll scale as you add more cores. Going from one core to two cores may need a rewrite. However, one you realize cores will keep increasing it won't take as many software changes to go from 4 to 6 or 8 as it did to go from 1 to 2. They just have to get over the first hump of teaching their software to work with many cores instead of one.

[the_deek]

"I love the whole multicore idea, but what's the point of 4 and 6 cores when 99% of all applications aren't even optimized for dual core?"

While this may be true in the desktop market, it is not at all true in the server market. Shanghai will first released as a server part under the Opteron name because the server market is their bread and butter. Server workloads are definitely optimized for multi-core processors, way more than desktop applications. A server could potentially sit above 90% utilization all day long depending on the application, while your desktop probably idles 90% of the time. Vastly different usage patterns.

[andrej1981]

Server applications are very well multi-threaded and there are the multi purpose servers also, I think. Virtualizitaion is an other good example for multi-core cpu usage. You can rid of - let's say - 10 old server and put them into one new and multicore server. The new virtual server will be faster and power consumption will go down by 60-80%. If they're in a datacenter you'll have a huge saving also.

On desktop you may use many applications paralel, so multicore will work fine there also.

[nutso101]

May the strongest win.

[sang u kim]

AMD says its first 45nm chip dubbed Shanghai is not Barcelona, and will outperform Barcelona about 20 percent. However, it doesn?t mention what process technology is used in Shanghai chip, and its performance and power, particularly compared to Intel?s 45nm process technology that utilizes advanced high K HfO2 /metal gate stacks as detailed in IEDM 2007.

Barcelona is PD (partially depleted) 65nm SOI based chip. There is no mention whether Shanghai is also based on PD SOI or FD (fully depleted) SOI or conventional bulk based oxy-nitride SiO2 gate or advanced bulk based like Intel 45nm. For Barcelona to be successful, it has to be equivalent or superior to Intel?s 45nm technology in device performance, power, reliability as well as profitability.

The Shanghai chip is one year behind Intel?s 45nm which is in high volume manufacturing since 2007, and AMD's 32nm might be one or more year behind Intel?s 32nm process technology yet to be announced, possibly late 2009 or early 2010. Intel is the only company today manufacturing high volume 45nm products. Doing so, Intel has gained critical learning and experiences in high volume manufacturing, circuit design and reliability required for easy transition to 32nm and beyond. AMD will face enormous challenges in getting back to profitability in high volume manufacturability race with Intel for the next generation technology development.