AMD To Launch 45nm Chips Ahead Of Schedule

Patla would not reveal speeds or prices for the forthcoming Shanghai chips, all quad-core, ACP (average CPU power) devices with 6MB of cache, or double the cache on Barcelona. He said those first 45nm products would be general-purpose server chips in the 75W thermal envelope that are socket-compatible with platforms for the current Barcelona generation of quad-cores. Those processors are currently in production at AMD's Fab 36 in Dresden, Germany and the chip maker's OEM partners are expected to have Shanghai-based servers available before the end of the year, he said.

Early next year, AMD will begin shipping 55W HE (highly efficient) Shanghai processors for the blade and cloud computing spaces, and 105W SE (special edition) chips for raw performance purposes, Patla said.

He said Shanghai's 35 percent average performance boosts over Barcelona are in large part due to the introduction of AMD's HyperTransport 3.0 technology, as well as instructions-per-cycle enhancements that result in an average performance improvement of 20 percent in clock-for-clock competition between the newer and older quads.

Patla also spoke briefly about AMD's roadmap for the second half of 2009 and beyond. The chip maker will produce its first server chipset since ending that business with its AMD-8111 chipset in 2004. Nvidia and Broadcom are currently the sole producers of server chipsets for AMD's Opteron products.

The new chipset, code named Fiorano, is due out in the second half of next year. It will remain a Socket F (1207), DDR2 product, with support for both Shanghai and a six-core server chip called Istanbul that is scheduled for production in the latter half of 2009.

In 2010, AMD will make the move to DDR3 memory with a new chipset, Maranello, and a new socket, G34, to go with server chips code named Magny-Cours and Sao Paulo. Magny-Cours will be a 12-core processor, while Sao Paulo will be an upgrade to the six-core line that will be introduced as Istanbul in 2009, according to AMD.