Bennett Ring18 August 2008, 1:00 PM
AMD is planning to gatecrash Intel's Nehalem party with a performance-beating CPU
There’s nothing like a last minute press conference to deflect attention from your rival’s upcoming development forum. AMD did exactly that on Friday, the eve of Intel’s latest IDF, when the company’s Vice President – Randy Allen – delivered an ETA for its upcoming Shanghai processor.
Server owners will have a new upgrade path in the fourth quarter of the year, when the first Shanghai powered systems are expected to hit the market. Given that the chips are due any time in quarter four, we’re guessing that Shanghai systems will probably arrive around the same time as a certain jolly guy who has a fetish for red suits.
Intel has yet to return fire; we’re expecting Nehalem chips to appear around September of this year, but they’re slated for desktop use first, with no word on a two-socket or four-socket server variant. However, given that Nehalem has been designed with multi-socket use in mind thanks to QuickPath, we’re quietly confident that Intel won’t let AMD take over server racks for long.
Shanghai has another ace up its sleeve thanks to its legacy chipset support. Intel’s Nehalem will require an entirely new motherboard chipset – an unavoidable consequence due to the memory controller now residing on the chip, removing the frontside bus once and for all. This will make the choice to upgrade to Nehalem-based servers a rather costly one, unlike Shanghai. Due to the fact that Shanghai is based on older AMD architecture, with the main difference being a process shrink to 45 nanometres and an increase in cache, it’ll work fine with existing AMD chipsets.
If the leaked Intel benchmarks that have been circulating the Net since March are any indication, showing a significant performance lead for Nehalem over Shanghai, AMD really needed a strong head start to help Shanghai get its foot in the door. While Q4 2008 is just around the corner, it’s doubtful that Intel won’t have time to respond.