AMD's 'Shanghai' with 45nm tecnhnology

Advanced Micro Devices well known as AMD on Thursday will launch Shanghai, a next-gen version of its Opteron server processor. Analysts says this launching is critical step for AMD's to give some competition to its market dominating rival Intel.
AMD used its advanced 45-nanometer semiconductor fabrication process to built Shanghai. This switch over brings AMD up to manufacturing parity with Intel. Nearly a year ago, Intel already switched to 45nm technology which means they are ahead of AMD.

Talking about Shanghai processors they are in quad-core models for two, four and eight-socket x86 servers. Officially known as Opteron 8000 and 2000 series, the chips contain clock speeds from 2.3 GHz to 2.7 GHz and power consumption is about 75 watts.
AMD plans to release a low power chip of 55 watts and another a faster one of 105 watts in the quarter of up coming year. A desktop version, code named Deneb(named after a star), is scheduled for release before the end of this year.

Shanghai will be sold under the Opteron brand and will range from $377 to $989 for the 2000series and from $1,165 to $2,149 for the faster 8000 series. The major computer makers like IBM, Dell, Hewlett-Packard are planning to ship Shanghai powered products.

While comparing Shanghai with its previous generation of Opteron chips it is expected to deliver a significant 35% increase in power efficiency and performance, almost triple the cache and higher clock speeds. AMD also scheduled to deliver HyperTransport 3, a technology that AMD claims will boost communication speeds between silicon. With all this advancements, Shanghai is a strong candidate for powering visualization technology.

Shanghai can easily replace current current AMD chip, and can be plugged in same motherboards with only a BIOS upgrade, this will make AMD's customer a easily switch over to Shanghai with a very less efforts according to AMD.