AMD Will Start Shipping Their Non-Existing Processor Line

Advanced Micro Devices have announced that they will ship their new Shanghai processor line starting the second half of the next year. Things are, however, more complicated for the chip manufacturer, since they have to unveil a processor that momentarily does not exist. The company has not managed to produce even a single working chip and now only pure luck can save them from the usual AMD product launch delay. If this is the case, the chipmaker will launch their 45-nanometer processors much later than the Intel rival.

"We have 45nm on the way. We will have initial samples also in January. I'm fairly confident that those puppies are going to boot", said Mario Rivas, executive vice president of computing products group at AMD.

The codename "Shanghai" includes AMD Opteron quad-core and dual-core processors to use AMD's K10 architecture, already present in the Barcelona family. The Shanghai chips are likely to feature a performance boost and a 512 KB of L2 cache per core with a 6MB of unified L3 cache - thanks to the adoption of the new 45-nanometer architecture.

Shanghai inherits not only the functionality already included in the Barcelona family, but also the design errors. The level 3 cache erratum to affect Barcelonas also affect the Shanghai line, and it is highly likely that AMD will release the first Shanghai units in February or March without the fix. Since AMD has announced that it will take up to three months to issue the fix, the June launch will be a pretty close shave.

"The 45nm, we consider it Rev C of the device. So all the learning, all the hard knocks that we had on Barcelona, we're going to apply it to Shanghai", Mr. Rivas added.

Intel stick to their roadmap and have already demonstrated the first working code-named Nehalem processors, built around the 45-nanometer technology. The company has also started shipping the 45nm chips based on Core 2 micro-architecture, which offers performance boosts at lower manufacturing costs.