by Scott Wasson for The Tech Report
AMD’s quad-core Opterons have certainly had a rough life to this point. The original “Barcelona” Opterons were hamstrung by delays, unable to meet clock frequency and performance expectations, and plagued by a show-stopper bug that forced AMD largely to stop shipments of the chips for months while waiting for a new revision. Once the revised Opterons made it into the market, they faced formidable competition from Intel’s 45nm “Harpertown” Xeons, whose best-in-class performance and much-improved power efficiency have stolen quite of a bit of the Opteron’s luster.
AMD is looking to reverse its fortunes with the introduction of a brand-new version of the quad-core Opteron, code-named Shanghai, which has been manufactured using a new, smaller 45-nanometer fabrication process that should bring gains in power efficiency and clock speeds.
Will it be enough to make the Opteron truly competitive with Intel’s latest Xeons? Here’s a comparison in order to find out.
