Benchmarks: AMD's 45nm 'Shanghai' Opteron

Christoph Hochstätter ZDNet Germany

Published: 20 Nov 2008

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Go to section: Introduction Virtualisation compatibility Expanded L3 cache Arithmetic performance Memory performance Virtualisation Conclusion

AMD's 45nm chips have arrived almost exactly one year after the first Intel processors to use the same feature size — currently the most advanced process used in mainstream processor production. Codenamed 'Shanghai', the new AMD processors are arriving first in quad-core Opterons for two-, four- and eight-processor server platforms, enabling up to 32 cores per server. Phenom variants for desktops, codenamed Deneb, are due in the first quarter of 2009.

For the most part, AMD is sticking with its previous 65nm processor design, Barcelona. But by investing in miniaturisation, AMD has created the space on the chip to increase the L3 cache, which was Barcelona's weak spot and which promises good performance return on design investment.

All Shanghai models offer up to 6MB of Level 3 (L3) cache, a three-fold increase on Barcelona's 2MB. The per-core caches — 512KB of L2 cache and 64KB of L1 data and instruction cache — remain unchanged.

On top of that, AMD now supports DDR2 RAM at up to 800MHz, an improvement on Barcelona CPUs' maximum of 667MHz. DDR3 RAM is not supported by the first Shanghai models. Furthermore they are not yet equipped with the HyperTransport 3.0 communications bus, which can run at up to 17GB/s. Early adopters will have to be content with 8GB/s. HyperTransport 3.0 and DDR3 support will be available in the second quarter of 2009.

The instruction set inherited from Barcelona remains unchanged, and Intel's SSE2 and SSE3 instructions are supported, as well as the standard x86 instructions. But although AMD's SSE4a corresponds to the functionality of the Insert and Extract instructions in Intel's SSE4.1, it is incompatible with them.

 

Although there are big price differences between Shanghai CPUs for 2-processor and 4- or 8-processor servers, technically there are almost none.

 

Go to section: Introduction Virtualisation compatibility Expanded L3 cache Arithmetic performance Memory performance Virtualisation Conclusion

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