Exclusive review: AMD Shanghai

 

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Posted on 13 Nov 2008 at 08:31

AMD has begun shipping its 45nm quad-core processor for servers, dubbed Shanghai.

Read our exclusive review of the Boston 3000GP rack server featuring the Shanghai processor here.

After the show-stopping bugs and manufacturing delays of its recent Barcelona launch, AMD will be hoping the rollout of its high-profile Shanghai processor goes more smoothly.

Shanghai will "heal the wounds of Barcelona," according to AMD's VP of the workstation and server division, Patrick Patla. He's at pains to point out that Shanghai parts are available in volume already, having been shipping to vendors since last month.

The company claims to have learned from the mistakes of the past, and to that end Shanghai will drop into the same socket as Barcelona for easy upgrading, with only a BIOS update necessary.

Alongside this, AMD is promising competitive pricing and a performance boost of around 20% over equivalent Barcelona chips, along with power savings of over 20% per core thanks to further refinements in power management, dubbed Cool Core. Among other features, each core is able to flush its Level 1 and 2 cache to the shared Level 3 cache before going to sleep, allowing other cores to get to the data without waking the core back up.

The company is very proud of its 45nm manufacturing techniques, using a new 'immersion lithography' process. The silicon wafers are washed using ultra-pure water, which AMD claims reduces the effects of chip-destroying dust particles, "You don't have to worry about dust," Patla says, adding that the process will be essential for the move to 32nm parts. Asked if the process has improved yields he refused to be drawn on numbers but added, "I'll think you'll see it show up in the price".

Those prices will initially be $377 for the 2.3GHz 2376 part, rising to $989 for the 2.7GHz 2384. Standard parts are joined by the 55W HE series, as well as 105W high-performance SE parts. But Patla claims that the vast majority of customers are looking for performance-per-watt parts rather than out-and-out speed at any price. Of the SE series he simply says: "Nobody buys those".

The performance of Shanghai may also offer some clues as to what we can expect from Deneb, AMD's 45nm desktop processor expected to launch during the first quarter of 2009.

It will have to be good. Intel will be rolling out its own 45nm desktop processor, the Core i7, on Monday. Read our review here.

Author: Stuart Turton and David Fearon