AMD unveils new chip for server platform

Bangalore, Nov 13: Leading chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Thursday unveiled a more powerful chip based on 45 nm (nanometre) quad-core Opteron processor, codenamed 'Shanghai', for server platform.

"The Opteron processor gives 35 percent more performance consuming 35 percent less power. Our Indian team made significant contribution to the design and development of the new chip working with the Austin R&D centre," AMD India managing director Dasaradha Gude told reporters at a preview of the product here.

As an improved version of AMD's previous Barcelona processor, the enhanced 45nm Shanghai microprocessor is built to drive data centre efficiencies and help enterprises achieve virtualisation performance up to 40 percent more than a 65nm processor.

Nanometre is a measure of one billionth of a metre or one millionth of a millimetre (mm). A 45nm process technology will have a billion transistors embedded in the new chip.

The US-based AMD has shipped the new processor to global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for mass deployment in the existing and new servers to be launched in the market by year-end.

AMD will initially manufacture nine versions of Shanghai, including five in the two-way Opteron 2,000 series, while four in the eight-way Opteron 8,000 series.

Shanghai also offers support for DDR2-800Mhz memory and a larger 6mb level 3 cache.

"Data centres are facing escalating pressures from computing demands of enterprise workloads because of web serving and database applications. The need to do more with less in the prevailing tough environment has become compelling. Emerging technologies such as cloud computing and virtualisation will require Opteron processors for higher performance," Gude said.

AMD hopes the Opteron processor based systems/products will grow rapidly this quarter and first quarter of 2009.

The latest processors will be available in the market from December at the 75watt and are priced less than dual-code chips.

"We are also planning to roll out higher-performance and more energy efficient 45nm processor technology to the desktop PC market in the first quarter of 2009 on a new platform codenamed 'Dragon', designed to harness the power of fusion by optimising the performance," AMD India silicon design head Karthik Muttuswamy said.