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AMD launches first 45nm CPUs
Shanghai workstation and server chips provide a glimpse of what we could expect from AMD's next line of desktop CPUs
AMD has been stuck on the 65nm boat for a while now, and its current chips are now looking pretty crusty when you consider that Intel’s 45nm Xeon CPUs were doing the rounds at the end of last year. However, the wait for AMD’s next-gen CPUs is finally over. The company has now officially launched its first 45nm ‘Shanghai’ Opteron chips for servers and workstations, which may well give us a glimpse of what we can expect from its forthcoming desktop CPUs, codenamed 'Deneb'.
AMD’s move to a 45nm process relies on immersion lithography, where a refractive fluid fills the gap between the lens and the wafer, which AMD says will result in ‘dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains.’ It’s also enabled AMD to increase the maximum clock speed of the Opterons from 2.3GHz with the Barcelona core to 2.7GHz with the Shanghai core. Given that current Barcelona-based Phenoms top out at 2.6GHz, this could mean much faster clock speeds for AMD’s future desktop chips.
Shanghai chips also feature much more cache than their predecessors, with 6MB of Level 3 cache bumping the total up to 8MB, and the chips share the same cache architecture as Barcelona CPUs, with a shared pool of Level 3 cache and an individual allocation of Level 2 cache for each core. As well as this, the Shanghai chips use HyperTransport 3.0, allowing bandwidth of up to 17.6GB/sec. Meanwhile, AMD plans to start introducing its six-core ‘Istanbul’ Opteron chips next year.
AMD is expected to launch its 45nm Deneb desktop CPUs before the end of the year, and they will also be fabricated on a 45nm process. However, unless the chips offer a serious improvement in performance over the current Phenom CPUs, the new chips will have a hard time competing with Intel’s recently launched Core i7 CPUs unless AMD dramatically undercuts them in price.
