Eastern promise
AMD unveiled its first processor using the 45nm manufacturing process today - codenamed Shanghai. This initial offering is a server CPU (branded Opteron), with the desktop processor - codenamed Deneb - due to follow shortly.
HEXUS.channel was at the Shanghai launch event in Berlin and spoke to a number of AMD execs. The general impression we got was of quiet confidence. They weren't as triumphant as at the launch of the 4800 GPU series earlier in the year, but you got the impression that this launch was pretty much going according to plan.
One of the reasons AMD may have been careful to rein in the bombast a tad may be the unfulfilled expectations that accompanied its last server processor launch - codenamed Barcelona. This was quite a hyped launch and, for a variety of reasons, the product failed to live up to expectations. In fact you could say that Shanghai is the product, and launch, that Barcelona should have been.
Leslie Sobon, AMD's VP of product and platform marketing, effectively confirmed as much when she made her presentation. "Shanghai has been two and a half years in the making," she said.
What follows is a summary of what AMD told us about Shanghai and what this means for the server market and for AMD's fortunes. Here's a photo of Sobon, flanked by AMD senior VP and GM for EMEA Emilio Ghilardi (right) and Damian Schmidt, the CEO of giant data centre outfit STRATO (left), which is one of AMD's biggest Opteron customers.
