AMD readies second-generation quad-core Opteron

AMD will release 'Shanghai', an "enhanced" version of its recently demo'd 'Barcelona' quad-core Opteron processor family, early on in 2008, the chip maker revealed yesterday when it published a server roadmap that was also notable for the absence of FB-DIMM technology and, indeed, DDR 3.

At least in public, AMD reckons DDR 2 will do the job for the foreseeable future - out into early 2009, on the basis of the roadmap. Just as current Opteron 1xxx, 2xxx and 8xxx CPUs use DDR 2, so too will Barcelona and 'Budapest', the future quad-core Opteron for single-processor systems. Barcelona and Budapest should appear mid way through 2007. The Budapest product marks part of AMD's big shift to HyperTransport 3, an event that's a defining point here and in its desktop and mobile roadmaps.

Shanghai is down as Barcelona's successor, but it appears that Budapest will continue out into 2009, backed, like its fellow Opterons, by chipsets from Nvidia and Broadcom.

AMD didn't say too much about Barcelona and Budapest, but the latter's almost certainly very similar to the top-of-the-line quad-core desktops coming out at roughly the same time. So it's likely to have 2MB of L3 cache shared among the four cores, each of which will have its own L2 cache. ®