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The company has just started to ship Opterons based on the Barcelona core, as already seen in the Phenom desktop processor. But already it's promising new multi-processor systems based on Shanghai, the server version of its quad-core 45nm CPU, before the end of 2008.

The company expects Shanghai's smaller die will increase performance per watt - one of the company's favourite battlegrounds, and one on which it claims to outperform Intel. In addition, it will allow higher clock speeds - welcome news for an architecture that currently maxes at 2.5GHz - and will bring a greatly increased 6MB L3 cache.

Shanghai will also support DDR2-800, a rise from the DDR2-667 currently supported by Barcelona.

Six-core CPUs

Then, in the second half of 2009, the company plans to introduce the industry's first native 6-core design, in another multi-processor part codenamed Istanbul. "We looked at power consumption and performance, and we identified six cores as

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the sweet spot," explained Randy Allen, general manager of AMD's server/workstation division.

Both Shanghai and Istanbul are intended to be fully socket and chipset-compatible with existing Barcelona-based Opterons.

On the way to Maranello

Finally, 2010 will see AMD move from the Socket F architecture to the new Maranello platform, using the RD870 and 890 chipsets and supporting HyperTransport 3.0 and DDR3. Istanbul will be replaced by a comparable Maranello-compatible chip known as Sao Paolo. The jewel in the crown will be Magny-Cours, a 12-core system, effectively comprising two Sao Paolo processors in parallel.

There are changes afoot on the uniprocessor side as well. Quad-core processors based on the 65nm Budapest core should be appearing already, supporting Socket AM2 with unbuffered DDR2.

Next year will then see the arrival of the Catalunya uniprocessor platform, supporting unbuffered DDR3 RAM. It will launch with the 45nm Suzuka quad-core CPU, with a similar specification to Shanghai, including the 6MB L3 cache.

One cynic at the announcement observed that, by 2010, Intel is expected to have moved to a 32nm process, leaving AMD once again playing catch-up.

But Randy Allen insisted that AMD was meeting its development targets and competing effectively with Intel. He emphasised the "tremendous adoption rate" of the new Barcelona Opterons among major x86 server manufacturers, including Dell, HP, IBM and Sun, and stressed that the company was in a "leadership position" in key areas such as virtualisation.