AMD ready to roll with Shanghai

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 30 Sep 2008 at 17:37

AMD says it will not repeat the mistakes made in its Barcelona rollout, as it prepares to launch its next generation server chip, dubbed "Shanghai".

The rollout of Barcelona was dogged with manufacturing delays and bugs that ultimately held it up by a staggering eight months.

It was a costly and embarrassing setback for the company which knocked around 40% off its share value, and allowed Intel to gain impetus in the lucrative server market. However, the company says it has now learned from the mistakes of the past.

"We had some mis-starts in getting Barcelona to market and wanted to bring as much velocity to Shanghai as possible," Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business tells Cnet. "Learn from our mistakes and, as a company, never do that again."

Shanghai will be AMD's first 45nm processor, and finally brings it to the same playing field as Intel, which launched its 45nm Penryn processors last year. According to Patla, similarly clocked Shanghai chips should outperform their Barcelona equivalents by about 20%.

"We're in full production right now in the factory," says Patla. "People will start getting first silicon from the final production very shortly."

Patla even believes launch could be pushed forward, from Q1 of 2009 to Q4 of 2008.