AMD’s 45nm Lineup
What’s been going on at AMD lately? Everything looks OK, but there’s always room for improvement, as they always say. Phenom X4 CPUs are selling pretty well, but I’m really interested in the upcoming 45nm lineup AMD is preparing for a Q3/Q4 2008 launch. Here’s some more disclosed info on this matter.
Codenamed Shanghai, as you probably already know, the 45nm AMD CPU seems to be nearly identical to the B3 stepping of Socket 1207 Opteron (Barcelona) that was launched several days ago. However, there’s one big difference between the two: Barcelona has its HyperTransport 3.0 clock generator fused off, while Shanghai is supposed to have it unblocked.
Motherboard manufacturers confirm that, with the advent of the Shanghai series, the HT3.0 will only be used for inter-CPU communication. According to DailyTech, AMD engineers even claim that inter-CPU communication is going to be a big deal with the 45nm refresh. The first breadcrumb comes with a new "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, currently codenamed Istanbul. Of course, AMD has to have its own response for Intel's recently announced six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor.
An interesting tidbit of info disclosed to DailyTech by AMD is the fact that Shanghai and its derivatives will also get twin-die per package treatment. No more nonsensical “native-core” bragging from AMD, when Intel still doesn’t have native quad-cores and manages to beat the Phenoms X4 CPUs pretty easily.
With this perspective in mind, it looks like we could actually see twin-die Istanbul processors integrating 12 cores in a single package. Each of these cores will communicate to each other via the now-enabled HT3.0 interconnect on the processor. But in order to take full advantage of these novelties you are supposed to make the leap for Socket 1207 mobos. So the Shanghai CPUs will be more server-oriented, but we might see some decent desktop derivatives as well.
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