AT: AMD Shanghai Launch

**Viperabyss** · #1 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 08:29 AM

AnandTech: AMD Shanghai Launch - Database Testing

Quote:

As you've seen, AMD is still competitive with Intel's 3.0 GHz Harpertown in the database workloads that we've shown here. We were quite surprised that Shanghai was able to meet and, in some cases, pass Harpertown at various workload levels in some of the benchmarks. Obviously, when it comes to power, AMD is still leading this space by a significant margin. FB-DIMMs obliterate any power efficiency in Intel's processors, especially when you have eight (or more in some cases) of them present in a server.

What about how Shanghai fairs against its older brother Barcelona? Well, in some cases, the gain is clearly just the increased clock speed. However, in others Shanghai achieves an increase of anywhere from 10-15% over and above the clock speed difference. It's obvious that Shanghai is what Intel would call a "Tock" of the clock for the Barcelona architecture, and it is a nice little bump for turning a few knobs and a die shrink. 2009 will be a very interesting year for AMD and Intel. Whether or not Shanghai can hold down the fort until Istanbul comes out remains to be seen.

**MeltDown** · #2 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 08:48 AM

Nice... it's good to see AMD putting out a good product. Maybe this will follow the same path as the graphics division did going from the 2900XT (ugh) to the 3870 (decent, could at least compete on $/performance) to the 4870 (completely ruining the competition's day by delivering ~80% the performance at half the price (as of launch)). So this would be like the 3870 following up the disaster of Barcelona.

1Tanker · #3 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 08:59 AM

Very good for AMD. FB-DIMMs was a huge FAIL for Intel...almost up there with Prescott.

**huddy** · #4 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 09:07 AM

C'mon... it's 4870 time AMD. Let's hope those Arabs give them a lot of money to keep producing chips and doing some good R&D.

**arisythila** · #5 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 09:59 AM

Nice!

**logainofhades** · #6 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 10:36 AM

All I can say is, "It's about damn time!"

Cain · #7 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 10:56 AM

Bah, they needed to include a single socket nehalem.

Cain · #8 (**permalink**) 11-13-2008, 08:42 PM

Wait, that roadmap......

Ok so we have:

Deneb: 4 cores and 8 MB cache (L2+L3)
Propos: 4 cores and 2 MB cache. So no L3? Awesome.

Both of these are going to be DDR2/DDR3 I just cant see that ending well. Thats all we got for all 2009/2010. Fun times.

Ok moving on.

Caspian: 2 cores and 2MB cache (1MB L2 each core?)

DDR2 only, thats for all 2009.

Replacing that we have

Champlain: 4 cores and still 2MB cache (sweet)

Its DDR3 only and we'll be enjoying people crying about that in 2010. Oh yeah I guess its 512k per core now.

**JumpingJack** · #9 (**permalink**) 11-14-2008, 07:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 1Tanker

Very good for AMD. FB-DIMMs was a huge FAIL for Intel...almost up there with Prescott.

Yep. No doubt. But they did not have much choice, with their platform arrangement, they had no way to effectively up the memory capacity and retain bandwidth/latency.

FB-DIMMs is the achilles heal of Intel's current implementation, and AMD effectively aimed right at it.

m25 · #10 (**permalink**) 11-16-2008, 05:53 AM

Shanghai looks good on paper, and maybe it will be worth an upgrade to deneb but looking at the roadmap, looks like Deneb and Propos are the only desktop designs in plan, supposed to carry AMD through 2009 and 2010,... only thing to ramp remains clock speed and then the transition to HKMG but seriously, who believes it will be enough with Intel ticking and tocking around

EDIT: Anyways, looking at the latest news about Catalyst 8.12 unlocking stream computing capabilities all the 4000 series cards, looks like AMD is running through a much faster path to get on top of high performance desktop computing, something only nVidia can compete with, at least on paper.