AMD 'Shanghai' Seen At Retailers

AMD's first 45-nanometer chip, the "Shanghai" quad-core Opteron, has made its unofficial debut at resellers. Online resellers PC Connection and Buy.com are both listing the Opteron Quad-Core 8384. Neither store actually says they are available, in fact Buy.com says they are out of stock, but it gives us a good view at the price point.

Here is a listing of the current prices:

AMD Opteron 83xx series:

• Opteron 8380 (2.50 GHz) - $1,600-1,770
• Opteron 8382 (2.60 GHz) - $2000-2,180
• Opteron 8384 (2.7GHz) $2,285-2,500
• Opteron 8378 (2.40 GHz) - $1,240-1,360

AMD Opteron 23xx series:

• Opteron 2380 (2.50 GHz) - $775-815
• Opteron 2382 (2.60 GHz) - $930-1,020

Roll out of the chip is expected officially on November 13, according to industry sources. Its expected that a total of nine CPUs with core frequencies between 2.3-2.7GHz will be offered initially. With 7 more chips being rolled out sometime in 2009, five 55W low-voltage server CPUs – three dual cores and two quad cores – along with two 105W high-performance models – one dual core and one quad core.

The new "Shanghai" chips feature support for DDR2 800MHz memory, a 6MB L3 cache, support for Hyper Transport 3.0, improved virtualization technology, and a die shrink from 65nm to 45nm.