AMD has announced to release its next generation Opteron quad-core chip, code-named Shanghai, ahead of schedule.

The chip leader has launched this processor so as to shift the market attention from Barcelona to this smaller and faster chip.

The new chip released is based on 45 nm architecture.  The new 45nm Opteron chip has got a quick endorsement from IBM as it has produced four servers with AMD’s chip for use in high-performance applications, virtualization and collaboration environments, and big databases.

Last year, AMD announced Barcelona chips but a bug discovery deferred its shipment until April 2008.
As per AMD, the new chip delivers a 35% performance boost at 2.7 GHz versus Barcelona’s 2.3 GHz top-end speed. The new chip has 6MB of L3 cache versus 2MB in the earlier quad core.

The Shanghai chip has high energy efficiency and is designed to work well with so-called virtualization.

Next thing for AMD will be its six-core chip, code named Istanbul, due out late next year. Recently, AMD has spun off its manufacturing and fabrication plant.

Satinder/ ITVoir Network