AMD speeds up, shrinks its Shanghai quad-core

Computerworld - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will today release its next-generation Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai, ahead of schedule as it moves to shift attention from its ill-fated Barcelona chip to this smaller and faster device.

The new 45nm Opteron chip's release is getting a quick endorsement from IBM, which said today that it is producing four servers with AMD's chip for use in high-performance applications, virtualization and collaboration environments, and big databases.

Barcelona, a 65nm chip, was announced in September 2007 at a corporate bash on a former military base, the Presidio, in San Francisco. Never mind that Intel had already released a quad-core -- AMD was confident it had the better chip.

But a bug was discovered in the processor, and Barcelona didn't ship in volume until April 2008. AMD had planned to release Shanghai at the beginning of next year. But it's out early, and AMD said it delivers a 35% performance boost at 2.7 GHz vs. Barcelona's 2.3-GHz top-end speed. The new chip has 6MB of Level 3 cache vs. 2MB in the earlier quad-core.

AMD is emphasizing in particular how its new server chip handles virtualization. For instance, it has reduced the amount of time it takes for the CPU to shift control from one virtual machine to another by 25%, "so the processor can spend more time processing the virtualized application than switching," said Brent Kerby, a senior product manager at AMD. The chip also has improved power management; at idle, it uses about 35% less power than Barcelona, the company said.

In making the Shanghai chip, AMD used a new manufacturing process called immersion lithography. In this process, ultrapurified water is injected between the lens and wafer, acting like a contact lens that improves the accuracy of the manufacturing. It's a process that will be especially needed for 32nm chips.

Martin Reynolds, an analyst at Gartner Inc., said Shanghai is a nice boost on the quad-core front and looks good against Intel's chips. But Reynolds didn't see the chip stealing the market. He said it's likely customers will be users shopping for a good ratio of price/performance in a chip.

Shanghai "keeps the light burning for the next round of product -- it's more of a maintenance product than something to try to move ahead in the market," said Reynolds.

Next up for AMD will be its six-core chip, code-named Istanbul, due out late next year. Since the splashy release of Barcelona, AMD regrouped and last month said it would split off manufacturing operations to create a separate fabrication plant, called The Foundry Co. The split, AMD officials said, would improve the company's ability to focus on developing new products.

The new IBM servers are blades and rack-mounted systems. While vendors often time server releases to the same day as new chips are introduced, AMD President and CEO Dirk Meyer told analysts last month that his company's relationship with IBM is special.

"IBM has publicly expressed their support behind The Foundry Co. venture, and the reason is clear: This brings technically and financially strong foundry to the IBM ecosystem. Clearly, that is good for IBM. They see that, and as a result of that, I do expect the partnership between the two companies to get stronger overtime," said Meyer, according to a transcript of the call on the Seeking Alpha Web site.

Read more about Processors in Computerworld's Processors Topic Center.