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Supermicro New Zealand
Shanghai AMD
28 November 2008
AMD has announced and released a new series of server processors called Shanghai and has claimed substantial performance improvements over Barcelona. This article will explain what Shanghai is about and assess its chance of reclaiming the performance crown from Intel.
| Shanghai is the 3rd member of the Socket F (1207 pin) server processor series. |
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Opteron
Opteron Barcelona
Opteron Shanghai |
2 core max, DDR
4 core max, DDR2, 65nm, 2MB L3 cache
4 core max, DDR2, 45nm, 6MB L3 cache |
According to tests done by Supermicro, a Shanghai-based system performs 35% better than Barcelona. The extra L3 cache and upgrade from DDR2-667 to 800 are said to be responsible for a 25% gain, and the higher Hyper-Transport inter-processor link speed of 2.4GHz is responsible for 10%. Barcelona has 1.0GHz inter-processor links only. In addition to the performance gain, Shanghai consumes less electricity and gives out less wasted heat. Supermicro has realised an improvement of performance per watt ratio from 860 for Barcelona to 1300 for Shanghai.
If the above is not enough to convince you, AMD has made virtualization improvements in Shanghai as well. This aspect, however, depends on whether Virtualization software vendors, namely VMware, Microsoft and Xen group, have updated their software correspondingly or not.
Intel has already surpassed AMD's Barcelona performance with its Clovertown Xeon by applying plenty of L2 cache. Intel has also announced the release of the Nehalem Xeon by February 2009. Nehalem adopts an architecture that is similar to AMD K8, that is, integrated memory access and modular inter-chip serial links. We will refrain from commenting on the comparative performance without going through a hands-on benchmarking process. However, the lay out of the above information should give our channel members a fair idea of what to expect.
-Editor
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Supermicro New Zealand
Managed by Compucon New Zealand
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