AMD Launches First 45nm Shanghai CPUs

arcticstoat writes "The wait for AMD's next-gen CPUs is finally over, as the company has now officially launched its first 45nm 'Shanghai' Opteron chips for servers and workstations. 'AMD's move to a 45nm process relies on immersion lithography, where a refractive fluid fills the gap between the lens and the wafer, which AMD says will result in 'dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.' It's also enabled AMD to increase the maximum clock speed of the Opterons from 2.3GHz with the Barcelona core to 2.7GHz with the Shanghai core. Shanghai chips also feature more cache than their predecessors, with 6MB of Level 3 cache bumping the total up to 8MB, and the chips share the same cache architecture as Barcelona CPUs, with a shared pool of Level 3 cache and an individual allocation of Level 2 cache for each core.'"

Comments

Making Me Feel Old

[withoutfeathers]

The first computer I ever worked on (as a data entry operator in the mid '70s) was an IBM S/360 mainframe with 64KB of "main" (physical) memory.

The first computer that I was a primary operator on, a S/360-135 plug-compatible 2Pi, had 768KB when it was delivered and was eventually bumped to 1.25MB shortly before I moved on to programming.

The computer upon which I wrote my first professional (COBOL) program was an IBM 3033 with a (for then) eye-popping 4MB of physical memory.

The first computer I ever owned was an RCA COSMAC with 4KB of memory.

The first DIY computer I ever assembled completely from parts (about 15 years ago) had 4MB of interleaved DRAM and a 256KB SRAM cache and was considered somewhat amazing by everyone who saw how fast it ran OS/2. I eventually boosted it up to 16MB

Now you get 8MB of on die cache with your four cores... And I still can't get a decent flying car.

This bodes well for the company

[default luser]

Just an off-the-cuff calculation on my part shows power consumption dropped over %50 over Barcelona, clock-for-clock.

This is good news, because when AMD moved from 90nm to 65nm, their leakage was so bad that the power consumption only dropped around %10 clock-for-clock. Combine this with better cache architecture (larger, and faster), and AMD may have a winner in the server space.

I'm not sure if they're going to take back the desktop anytime soon. Intel doesn't have the FBDIMM downside on desktop systems, and I'm fairly sure that Shanghai didn't add major microarchitecure changes, so a quad-core Core2, let alone an i7, should continue to dominate the desktop.

However, it is nice to know that the market once again will have a choice in processors. AMD's 65nm offerings were spanked in terms of performance and power consumption by Intel's lineup, but Shanghai will at least compete on the power front, if not the performance front. We shall see what happens when AMD releases their desktop version.