AMD to release very low-power Shanghai CPUs soon

April 6, 2009

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AMD will release very low-power Shanghai CPUs by July, a move that could intensify its ongoing chip war with semiconductor giant Intel. The new quad-core Opteron EE chips will deliver similar performance while consuming significantly less power than its predecessors, an AMD spokeswoman has said.

American Micro Devices's server processors draw a minimum of about 50 watts of power on average.

AMD's newer microprocessors will be manufactured using a 45-nanometer manufacturing process and will be part of the Opteron processor family code-named Shanghai.

In addition to adding two more cores, AMD is also adding power management features and improvements to boost the chips' performance, said Margaret Lewis, a product marketing director in AMD's server and workstation division. AMD is also making progress with its upcoming line of six-core server processors, codenamed Istanbul.

AMD hopes its new "Istanbul" chips will deliver improved performance while drawing the same amount of power as existing quad-core Shanghai server chips.

The Istanbul chips are based on the Shanghai core, with the "same energy efficient parts" and additional cache, Lewis said. She didn't provide further details of the technologies, but said the improvements should help the CPU handle heavier processing loads.

The Istanbul chips are also due in July 2009, Lewis said. Server vendors Dell and Hewlett-Packard will support Istanbul CPUs on their servers when the chip is released, according to the companies.

AMD's announcements come a day after Intel announced new quad-core Xeon server chips, which the chip maker is pitching as the most significant revamp of its server chip line since the release of the Pentium Pro in 1995. The launch took away AMD's long-standing technology advantage of integrating a memory controller on the CPU.

It's rather difficult to directly compare Intel's and AMD's servers chips as they are based on different architectures, said Dean McCarron, principal at analyst firm Mercury Research. The chip makers compete for market share, and are pushing the boundaries in the areas of price, performance and some other metrics, he said.

Smart server buyers look for real value and take a number of cost factors into careful scrutiny, including workload utilization and power consumption of chips. That has led the chip makers to pack more power into chips via the addition of cores, which also helps reduce power consumption, McCarron said.

Adding more cores in processors makes sense as companies look to consolidate servers and run more applications in virtualized environments. Servers equipped with faster chips can execute more tasks compared to slower servers, which could help consolidate servers in data centers. In anticipation of the first big jump out of quad-core chips, AMD demonstrated the first working units of Istanbul about 8 weeks ago. A company representative at the time said servers with eight sockets could include up to 48 cores with Istanbul chips. Intel already ships a six-core chip for servers, known as Dunnington.

"We're pleased to see our competitor come to use the integrated memory controller technology we introduced more than six years ago," Lewis said. Next year, AMD will double the core count on its processors to twelve with a chip codenamed Magny Cours, which will support the faster DDR-3 form of memory.

Intel is also continuously adding more cores to its server chips, and will release new six-core and eight-core chips later in 2009 or early in 2010.

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Source: AMD.

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