AMD Officially Launches Shanghai, Announces Phenom II

Today AMD officially announced widespread availability of its new 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor codenamed "Shanghai." AMD says the new CPU delivers up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle.

The enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations through the following:

• Significantly higher CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope in comparison to previous generations of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. This is the result of processor design enhancements, industry-leading AMD 45nm immersion lithography technology, and strong execution on processor design and validation.
• A 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database, and Java.
• DDR2-800 memory support which delivers greater memory bandwidth than current AMD Opteron processors, and remains significantly more energy-efficient than Fully-Buffered DIMM technology found in competitive offerings.
• Upcoming enhancements to the revolutionary AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport™ 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication planned for Q2 2009.

The new "Shanghai" processors should be available at retailers immediately, in fact as we reported earlier this month many retailers had already began posting the new Opteron 8300 series CPUs.

Phenom II X4 Announced:

At the end of the "Shanghai" press release came the announcement of the new 45nm Phenom II X4 line.

The Phenom II X4 is expected to e released late this year and will follow the company’s smaller, faster 45nm Opteron chips. The new chip will feature 8MB of cache and support both DDR2 and DDR3 in the AM3 and AM2+ sockets. Phenom II X4 will be part of AMD’s “Dragon” platform that combines the new chip with DX10.1 graphics, the company’s new Stream GPU processing, OverDrive and Fusion for gaming utility.

AMD's new "Dragon" platform will be the second generation AMD performance desktop platform, featuring all next-generation components in comparison to the first generation AMD "Spider" platform released in 2008. The AMD "Dragon" platform is designed to harness the power of fusion by optimizing the performance of new 45nm AMD Phenom II X4 quad-core processors with award-winning AMD 700 Series chipsets and award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics.