The No. 2 processor maker wants to make one thing crystal clear: Shanghai is not Barcelona. The latter chip was rolled out in September 2007 to great fanfare only to be delayed a whopping eight months (or more, depending how the delay is calculated) due to production glitches and bugs. The chip was also hampered by speed (core clock frequency) limitations. This gave Intel an opportunity to regain ground it had lost to AMD in the server chip market.
"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.
Shanghai: a quad-core product targeted at servers; will be AMD's first 45-nanometer processor. (Barcelona is 65-nanometer.) Typically, the smaller the geometries, the faster and more power efficient the chip. Intel has been shipping 45-nanometer processors since last year and these processors now make up most of Intel's offeringsPatla asserted that Shanghai is a "very power efficient product" and will perform much better than Barcelona because the smaller 45-nanometer process yields "a lot more (clock) frequency."At the same frequency (speed), Shanghai will outperform Barcelona by about 20 percent, Patla said.
AMD is also boosting the size of the cache memory, which typically speeds performance, from 2 megabytes to 6 megabytes. Another speed improvement will come from increasing "instructions per clock," Patla said.
"We're also turning on HT3 (HyperTransport 3) and you'll see partners start to validate that in the Q1 time frame," Patla said. HyperTransport is a high-speed communication link technology between silicon.
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Well, they have said a lot about outperforming Barcelona here in this interview. However they should be focusing more upon beating their opponents from the Intel's base. Let's see if AMD can pull it this time or not.
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