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AMD's next K10 revision, "Shanghai," looks like its pretty competitive with current Intel Xeon machines. It will be some time until Intel releases Nehalem-based Xeon CPUs, so for now AMD is back in the game. ArsTechnica has some more details.

EDIT: K10, not K8.

Server apps always have been K10's strength, thanks to Intel's stuff creaking by on their old memory bus architecture. They'd better make the most of their time before Intel puts server Nehalems out (and hope that the 8xxx can compete with the 6-core Xeons), as that should in theory take away AMD's last primary advantages over Intel's stuff.

DaveJB wrote:Server apps always have been K10's strength, thanks to Intel's stuff creaking by on their old memory bus architecture. They'd better make the most of their time before Intel puts server Nehalems out (and hope that the 8xxx can compete with the 6-core Xeons), as that should in theory take away AMD's last primary advantages over Intel's stuff.

1S and 2S Nehalem-based systems should be coming relatively soon, but 4S configurations are awhile off, and AMD should be able to compete well there.

What a ridiculous "launch". A small set of database benchmarks and no internal details about the chip itself? And AMD calls this a launch?

Anyway, I don't see what there is to be optimistic about here. The benchmark set is so limited that this could easily be the result of the larger cache alone (which would not provide good returns across a greater variety of applications) and they are comparing this to Harpertown which is going to get eclipsed by the tune of 30-50% by Nehalem based server chips.

You could have easily seen that Shanghai would be DOA for the desktop by the way AMD handled this launch; stealth launches do not bode well for any hardware product.

To be fair, the original Opteron launch was pretty low-key as well... although why certain people are expecting a die shrink with a larger L3 to be competitive not only with Core 2 but Core i7 as well is beyond me.

I think we will be lucky if the chip is even competitive with any of the current Core 2 Duos/Quads. With too little benchmarks, it's a little too early to break out the champagne.

DaveJB wrote:To be fair, the original Opteron launch was pretty low-key as well... although why certain people are expecting a die shrink with a larger L3 to be competitive not only with Core 2 but Core i7 as well is beyond me.

Oh sure the benchmarks on launch day weren't very comprehensive, but for all the other Opteron launches (including I might add for Barcelona) they released tons of core information ahead of time. In this case the tech sites have had only the most broad overview of the Shanghai design and even less benchmarks than normal.

What a crock of shit.

The Kernel wrote:Oh sure the benchmarks on launch day weren't very comprehensive, but for all the other Opteron launches (including I might add for Barcelona) they released tons of core information ahead of time. In this case the tech sites have had only the most broad overview of the Shanghai design and even less benchmarks than normal.

What a crock of shit.

On the other hand, if this truly is just a die shrink with a bigger cache and a better power/performance level, it would actually make some sense for AMD not to be playing up this launch too much. Usually their Opteron die shrinks get no attention at all.

Still if that's the case, it bodes really badly for competition in the desktop market (and eventually the server market, when Nehalems start showing up there). I can't see this new chip doing very well at all there.

DaveJB wrote: On the other hand, if this truly is just a die shrink with a bigger cache and a better power/performance level, it would actually make some sense for AMD not to be playing up this launch too much. Usually their Opteron die shrinks get no attention at all.

Still if that's the case, it bodes really badly for competition in the desktop market (and eventually the server market, when Nehalems start showing up there). I can't see this new chip doing very well at all there.

What's worse is their new roadmaps. See below:



Take a look at that roadmap...AMD is essentially using Shanghai for the next two years before any sort of refresh. During that time, Intel will go through both a "Tick" (Westmere which will shrink Nehalem to 32nm) and a "Tock" (Sandy Bridge, a completely new design with a brand new advanced vector processing engine).

Even if you assume that AMD can coax some very respectable clock scaling out of Shanghai, two years is an awfully long time for a processor that barely competes with the 65nm Kentsfield processors, which will be 4 years old by the time AMD trots out their next gen architecture. This is an incredibly sad state of affairs and the only conclusion that we can draw from this is that Intel is going to be kicking the crap out of AMD for the next 2 years.