First look: AMD's 45nm Shanghai

Mehan Jayasuriya — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:57:26 -0400

We all knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: as the DailyTech headline proudly announces, "The Megahertz Race is Now Officially the Multi-core Race." If you're an AMD fan who felt burned by the performance and production issues that plagued the company's recent Barcelona quad, you'll be glad to hear that it's stepping its game up with a next-gen CPU, code-named "Shanghai." Like Intel's Xeon and Atom lines, Shanghai will be produced using a 45nm manufacturing process, a first for AMD. What's more, it will sport the HyperTransport 3.0 clock generator that was conspicuously absent from Barcelona. The real fun, however, comes in the core count that Shanghai will bring to the table. The first Shanghai CPU to hit the market likely will be "Istanbul," a Shanghai-derived "native six-core" chip that will face off against Intel's six-core "Dunnington." But that's not the interesting part. According to DailyTech, AMD will abandon its "native core" rhetoric a few months later, opening the door to chips with more than one core per die. That, in turn, could lead to a twin-die, 12-core Shanghai derivative. Exciting stuff, indeed. But having been burned by AMD plenty of times in the past, we have to wonder if the company will be able to get these products out on time. Will Shanghai join the ranks of previous AMD parts that were too little, too late?

For more on Shanghai:
- see this DailyTech article