AMD counts on new Shanghai series to shore up image
Just over a year ago, AMD released its Barcelona processors behind schedule and with a series of performance problems. Now the company is relying on the before-schedule release of the successor series, Shanghai, to shore up an image that the Barcelona weakened. At stake is the company’s share of the processor market, which has been slipping since the introduction of the ill-fated Barcelona series 14 months ago.
The new processor is available in speeds from 2.3 to 2.7 Ghz and in two form factors. The two-way Opteron 2000 series will be priced from $377 to $989. The eight-way Opteron 8000 series prices range from $1,165 to $2,149. The 8000 series will not include a 2.3 GHz component. Both series started with the basic Barcelona design, so they are still quad-core, but feature improvements in virtualization and increased speeds, both due to their newer 45-nanometer layout.
The problems with the Barcelona series caused a significant blow to AMD’s reputation. Perhaps worse than the performance problems and bugs found in the previous processor release was missing the delivery date for the Barcelona chip. Ian Lao, an analyst at InStat, put it this way to a reporter at TechNewsWorld: “The biggest [improvement] is showing AMD resolving development issues of their house, and [it] goes a big way to re-establishing their credibility. The customers of AMD’s customers view this credibility as important as they make their IT purchasing decisions.”
The Shanghai chip shows significant development enhancements over the older, more problematic Barcelona. Ian Lao was also quoted as saying, “”[The] biggest win is keeping the same power envelope so OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) don’t have to re-design their power supplies and power backplanes. For customers, they can get more servers/performance/server for a given physical footprint, power footprint.”
These are huge improvements, and should go along way toward rebuilding AMD’s reputation in the processor marketplace. The new processor from major rival Intel (Nehalem) is due out any week now. Getting to market first, and without problems, should give AMD a leg up in this round of processor upgrades. Everyone can agree that healthy competition between Intel and AMD in the processor marketplace will serve to keep performance up and prices down.
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