AMD's confidence is not in such bad shape as you might think. They are certainly burdened by the current economical situation, but on the other hand, Ruiz decision to step down has inflated employees with much needed faith and displaced much of the lingering feelings from the horrific Barcelona launch. The Shanghai project has been handled in a completely different way and as it was said in a recent interview, Shanghai, and Deneb, will arrive in the fourth quarter of this year.
First we will see Shanghai, but not just in ways of a paper launch but actual products from first and second-tier partners. Shortly afterwards, AMD hopes to launch Deneb with retail availability. While the first Deneb review was anything but impressive in terms of raw performance it may not be the best of guide lines, but it did show that AMD has reduced the power consumption in all aspects of the game.
In the interview, Pat Patla, General Manager of AMD's Server and Workstation chip business, said that Shanghai will outperform Barcelona with up to 20% at identical frequencies, but also scale higher than Barcelona ever did. The performance gains are greatly a result of the much larger cache and the enabled HyperTransport 3.0 bus. Alas, this will not have the same effect with the desktop Deneb core, but it certainly won't make things worse.
All in all, AMD is confident that its new chips will bring back a lot of the old customers and put AMD back in the game. While no one really expects Shanghai or Deneb to outperform Nehalem, much thanks to the extensive media coverage Nehalem has received over the last months, we wouldn't be surprised if they put up a good fight.
The most expensive of the new Phenom models should be priced right about the same as the cheapest Core i7, but run at higher frequencies and thus be able to compete. The faster Nehalem models will most likely reign supreme, but considering how many of those that are actually sold, we're guessing AMD is willing to let Intel have that segment.
This is looking to be one of the most intense launches in a very long time. We know that Nehalem is fast, but how fast is Shanghai?
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