Advanced Micro Devices is making it clear that its upcoming 45-nanometer processor for servers—"Shanghai"—will compete against what Intel brings to market with its new line of processors based on the upcoming "Nehalem" microarchitecture. According to AMD Senior Vice President Randy Allen, the chip will ship in Q4 2008, and his company will be ready with its server products before Intel. "They [Intel] won"t be factoring our 45-nanometer Shanghai product and be making shipments of that by the end of the year," Allen said.
However, despite much talk about how Shanghai will be competing against Nehalem, there was a notable absence of details about Shanghai during Allen"s press conference, held on the eve of the Intel Developer"s Forum, including specifics on performance improvements. AMD has previously said Shanghai will contain 6MB of Level 3 cache compared with the 2MB of L3 cache in the company"s current crop of quad-core Opteron processors. Something AMD has in its favor is that the Shanghai chips will be compatible with the current group of Opteron chips. With BIOS update, users can upgrade their systems fairly easily, which should help AMD move the products into the marketplace.