Last year's introduction of the 65nm quad-core Barcelona chips was met with great disappointment and concern, amid numerous manufacturing delays and bugs that ultimately held them up by a whopping eight months after being introduced. It was a costly and embarrassing setback for AMD, but the company says it will not repeat the same mistakes as it prepares to launch its next generation server chip, dubbed "Shanghai," which is already in production.
Shanghai will be their first 45nm processor and the company is counting on several factors to improve performance over Barcelona, such as moving the cache memory from 2MB to 6MB and adding support for HyperTransport 3. According to Pat Patla, general manager of AMD's server and workstation chip business, Shanghai chips should outperform their Barcelona equivalents by about 20%.
The company is expected to begin commercial shipments of its quad-core server chips made using 45nm process technology in Q4 2008, followed by desktop CPU parts using the same fabrication process a few weeks later or early 2009.