Date: 08/11/2008

Quad core Shanghai's performance to regain AMD's server processor business

The improved 45nm quad-core processor named Shanghai from AMD, which is already in production, offers significant performance improvement over Barcelona(earlier quad-core processor from AMD). With Shanghai, AMD is expected to heat up the competition with Intel's Xeon processors in server market. Barcelona had few glitches due to which AMD slightly fallen back in this server processor market, but with Shanghai and yet to be released 6-core processor Instanbul, AMD and Intel will have stiff competition ahead.

The advantages of Shanghai in comparison to Barcelona are,

1. Shanghai will consume approximately 20 percent less power at idle than Barcelona,
2. Offer a full 6MB of L3 cache, as opposed to Barcelona's 2MB of L3.

Other features include AMD-V (meant to improve virtualization performance) and support for DDR2-800 memory.
Randy Allen, corporate VP and general manager for AMD's Server/Workstation division characterized Shanghai as a "tweak" of Barcelona's architecture, but predicts a performance increase of 20 percent over Barcelona.