AMD's Shanghai Chip Spotted at Retailers

Advanced Micro Devices' Shanghai quad-core Opteron processor, the first 45 nanometer chip manufactured by the company, is already listed at retailers. The new chip is meant to replace AMD's well known Barcelona processor. The quad-core Shanghai CPU Comes with a range of improvements over the previous generation chips and is expected to see a much better inclusion in the market than Barcelona.

The new AMD processors have not been officially introduced by the manufacturer, but they are expected to be launched on November 13th, according to industry sources. The chips that got listed at retailers are the Opteron 837X and 838X series, and it seems that they are not cheap at all. The Opteron QC (quad-core) 8384 is listed on two sites, PC Connection and Buy, at $2,509 and $2,240, respectively. The chip is supposed to feature a core speed of 2.7GHz and comes with 75 watts power consumption.

Another new AMD server processor listed is 8385, which has the same core frequency but a faster system bus. PC Connection offers it for $2,509. The site also lists the 8382 (2.6GHz), 8380 (2.5GHz), and 8378 (2.4GHz) CPUs, priced $2,177, $1,768, and $1,360, respectively. The prices will differ for sure from the official AMD pricing. Also listed are chips from the Shanghai Opteron 230X series, namely the 2382 (2.6GHz) and 2380 (2.5GHz), priced at $1,019 and $814 respectively.

The Shanghai processors are said to eliminate all the “mistakes” AMD made with Barcelona. The previous-generation chip was supposed to launch in September 2007, but faced a whopping eight-month delay due to manufacturing glitches and bugs, which made the Sunnyvale company lose ground in favor of its arch-rival Intel. According to AMD, Shanghai is in full production at the moment.

The first server systems powered by the new Shanghai processors are expected to ship during this quarter. Sun Microsystems already announced plans to offer the Shanghai processors included on its current x64 platforms running Barcelona. A spokesman of the company said that the first systems featuring Shanghai would come in early 2009.

According to AMD, the Shanghai microprocessor will outperform Barcelona by more than 20 percent at the same clock speed. The new chip will include a larger cache memory, boosted to 6MB, up from the 2MB Barcelona had. Also, the new CPU features increased “instructions per clock,” also meant to leverage speed. According to Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business, AMD is “turning on HT3 (HyperTransport 3)”, a new communication path between chips meant to become available in the first quarter of the next year.