Shanghai draws praise from system builders

by Nick Booth, 20 Nov 2008

System builders have responded positively to Shanghai, the code name for AMD’s latest core-processor model ­ with many saying it is far better than the previous Barcelona platform. AMD has promised Shanghai will be the best platform for virtualisation performance and easy live migration. But following disappointment with Barcelona, many system builders questioned whether the new 45nm design could produce the industry’s fastest stable x86 server platform architecture so far. Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SME customers more than 25 systems, available between now and the end of the year, based on the 45nm quad-core AMD Opteron processor. The main improvements are expected to be the 45nm process, an improved prefetch, increased and improved caching, faster virtualisation and a new energy-efficient, cache-saving feature called Smart Fetch. Subhas Patel, managing director of system builder Satine Interactive said that, despite being a “shrunken version” of the Barcelona chip (down from 65nm), the Opteron is solid.

Read more here -->Link