14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices announced on Monday that its next-generation “Shanghai” microprocessor was getting ready to be rolled out. The company also said that the new chip would come with many improvements over its predecessors and without the bugs we saw in those CPUs. Shanghai is expected to replace the company's Barcelona chip on the quad-core server segment of the market. The Sunnyvale-based firm also announced that it wouldn’t repeat the mistakes it made with Barcelona, when the company lost ground on the server area in favor of Intel.
“We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible. Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again,” said Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business. For those that may have forgotten, the chip was delayed for about eight months due to production bugs and it came to the market featuring some core clock speed limitations.
The new Shanghai processor is fabricated under the 45nm manufacturing process, unlike Barcelona, which was 65nm. The smaller die should bring leveraged speed and more power efficiency to the chip. The competitor Intel has its 45nm CPUs shipping since last year, and the company offers mostly these chips.
As the firm has registered bad quarters lately and the news circling around announced a major restructuring for the company, AMD has to make Shanghai successful. “To bring it back to profitability the execution of the server product line is absolutely critical,” said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. “That is really their only profit pool.”
According to Patla, AMD the entire Shangai project has been attributed to a lead engineer who must ensure the marks for the “health of the silicon, the schedule for the silicon, and the confidence level of the silicon”. He also said that AMD had to know for sure that “the product that we put in the hands of our partners is going to be of substantial stability so they can do lots of early validation”.
“Originally the plan was that Shanghai would launch in Q1 of '09 and we were able to pull that into Q4,” Patla revealed. He added that the new chip would be announced in Q4 and that vendors would be able to start shipping servers right away. “We're in full production right now in the factory,” he said. “People will start getting first silicon from the final production very shortly.”
According to Patla, Shanghai will have leveraged core clock frequencies over Barcelona due to the 45nm technology, will perform a lot better and will also prove to be a “very power efficient product”. He said than Shanghai is expected to outperform Barcelona by 20 percent at the same core speed. The performance level will be boosted through the increased cache memory of the chip (6MB compared to 2MB on the previous CPU), while increased “instructions per clock” will improve speed even more.
“We're also turning on HT3 (HyperTransport 3) and you'll see partners start to validate that in the Q1 time frame,” Patla revealed.
AMD also unveiled a few more details on its CPU roadmap. The next microprocessor to come on the 45nm fabrication process after Shanghai is code-named Deneb and it is set for launch either by the end of this year or at the beginning of the next one. The Sunnyvale company plans to launch a six-core chip in the fourth quarter of 2009. “We'll take what we've learned from our 45-nanometer process and Shanghai core and bring out an Istanbul six-core product,” Patla added. This CPU will be targeted at servers featuring up to eight processor sockets, the same as Shanghai.