AMD’s Shanghai, the revised successor to today’s Barcelona-based Opteron quad cores, has hit the streets and received a thorough performance analysis in server applications.
While the refinements have done quite a bit to bolster the ailing Opteron platform, the Shanghai still is not enough to reclaim supremacy in a majority of the applications tested. As it was believed, Shanghai efficiency still has not risen to Harpertown-level performance, though recent progress shows that AMD is fighting with a renewed spirit.
The Opteron does best when it’s able to take advantage of its superior system architecture and native quad-core design, and it suffers most by comparison in applications that are more purely compute-bound, where the Xeons generally have both the IPC and clock frequency edge.
The new Shanghai, sizing up at 45nm and coming to the table with cache, execution and IMC refinements, has been expected since November 13. The new Opterons, appearing in 837X, 838X, and 238X flavors, are currently priced between $814 for 2.5GHz Opteron 2380 to $2240 for the Opteron 8384.
Other solutions, based on the not-yet-validated HyperTransport 3.0 specification, are expected by the beginning of the year and may further narrow the gap.
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