Filed under: Desktops

Let's not beat around the bush: AMD's oft-delayed Barcelona quad-core processor was a flop. It arrived late and buggy, an undesirable reception that helped to drive the company's $1.2 billion Q2 loss this year. AMD can't afford another flub like that and is hoping that processor's successor, Shanghai, finds more success in the server market. It's a 45nm quad-core chip with three times the cache (6MB) and HyperTransport 3, apparently equating to a 20 percent boost in speed and even thriftier power consumption. AMD is saying the chip is already under production and will be available for sale before the year is out, actually beating expectations for once. That should be shortly followed by the release of 45nm Deneb processors for desktops, then six-core Istanbul chips sometime late 2009. Meanwhile, Intel's six-core, 45nm server chips are now shipping.

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