Planet Lowyat

Intel Quad Core processors is coming soon - AMD ‘Shanghai’

According to The Register,

Today, x64 chip maker Advanced Micro Devices will launch its “Shanghai” quad-core Opteron processors for servers and workstations, concurrent with its annual financial analyst day meeting and ahead of schedule by AMD’s reckoning.

The new chip - which offers more computing power, less heat dissipation, and better bang for the buck than its “Barcelona” replacement - closes some of the gaps that rival Intel has opened up with its Xeon x64 chips. And it gives AMD a chance to get its business back on track and get its server partners somewhat enthusiastic about AMD after a number of them got burned by the chip maker’s delay in getting its initial quad-core chips out the door last year.

That gave Intel an opening to chew into market share gains that AMD made with single-core and dual-core Opterons since the product was launched in April 2003. And with a revamped, Core-based product line, the Xeons certainly have done that, despite some technical reasons why the Opteron design is better.

The Opterons were launched to much fanfare as the first 64-bit x86-compatible processor, and one with a funky interconnect called HyperTransport that looks an awful lot like the QuickPath Interconnect that Intel hopes to start rolling out in servers early next year and which makes its debut in the Core i7 processors any day now. While the tier one server vendors were a little cold to the Opterons at first, IBM played around a bit with one machine, and then Sun Microsystems said it would partner with AMD to create a new “Galaxy” server line, followed by Hewlett-Packard, which created Opteron variants in its ProLiant rack and BladeSystem blade server lines.

Please check The Register for more information.