Welcome back AMD - Shanghai is ready to roll out
Shanghai Chip
With Intel’s Nehalem at the verge of release, AMD won’t sit back and count it’s losses. It’s been almost a year since the less than awesome release of the Phenom and AMD is trying to get back on it’s feet with a refresh of it’s architecture. Dubbed Shanghai, it’s set to bring back the memories of the good old AMD fanboism and more.
Under the hood
Although Shanghai is technically a refresh, it does sport several improvements other than a smaller die (45nm from 65nm). While AMD hasn’t revealed all the details on what it revamped in Shanghai, but here’s what we know.
Shanghai carries 6MB of L3 cache (up from 2MB) and officially support DDR2-800 (Barcelona topped out at DDR2-667). Included with the new chips is AMD’s new power-saving technology it called Smart Fetch and improved virtualization performance. The chip’s integrated memory controller can now split itself into two 64-bit channels (it was only always at 128-bit mode before)
Smart Fetch?
Smart Fetch is AMD’s new power-saving technology that allows the chip to completely power down cores that aren’t in use. While there’s no word yet if this will be included into Deneb, the upcoming desktop flavor of Shanghai, it’s an interesting feature to look forward to.
Smart works by reading the sum totals of its L1 and L2 cache, then drops that data into L3 before powering down a CPU completely. When the core need to be powered up again, Smart Fetch grabs the requisite blocks of L3 cache, and rewrites them into L1/L2.
Is it worth it?
Performance- and price-wise, Shanghai seems to have hit the mark. It’s also good to note that for Phenom adopters, Shanghai chips are compatible with Barcelona boards. So if you’re thinking of a small upgrade rather than a brand new CPU, Shanghai is definitely something to look forward to.
“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.” -AnandTech
You can look up AnandTech’s review of Shanghai here.
What do you get when you combine improved performance, improved clockspeeds, and better power consumption? In this case, you get back in the game. Congratulations, AMD—it’s about time you stopped carving a groove in the bench.
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