AMD clims that dits new processot, codenamed Shanghai, delivers phenomenal perFormance while consuming very little power. This 45nanometer (nm) chip has significant Indian contributions, as a team of engineers from India developed the core parts of the central processor and memory interFaces.

According to AMD, the new processor helps boost data centre efficiencies and reduce complexities, while offering a superior virtualisation perFormance. It comes with an independent dynamic core technology, which reduces processor energy consumption by adjusting the power usage of each core. "The enhanced quad-core
AMD Opteron processor combines perFormance, power efficiency, and virtualisation enhancements with silicon innovations. This delivers unique performance in the areas
that are most critical For businesses," says Ramkumar Subramanian, vice president - Marketing and Sales, AMD India.

Chipping away at energy and improving performance:-

The newborn in the Opteron Family Features a slew of innovative power-saving technologies, claim its creators. Features christened the Smart Fetch and the CoolCore reduce CPU power consumption. The Smart Fetch technology sets cores to enter a halt-state during idle processing times, without affecting application perFormance. This complements the CoolCore technology, which reduces the power flow to unused sections of each processor and further reduces power consumption. There are different blocks inside each core that are switched off, when a particular program does not use them. This faculty also helps switch power on and off within a single clock cycle, thus saving a lot of energy. So, you don't need to worry about the buzzing insides of your PC while sipping a Cappuccino during an evening break.
1be new processors belt out a Faster performance by enhancing virtual machine efficiency. This chip incorporates hyper-transport technology, which provides scalable bandwidth interconnect between processors, Input/Output (I/O) subsystems and other chipsets. Through three coherent hyper transport links, it provides up to 24 gigabytes/second of bandwidth per processor. The low voltage and power consumption help reduce a system's thermal budget (heat-use) to 35 per cent less than with Barcelona.

2009: Enter the Dragon?
"This quad-core AMD Opteron processor delivers some of the most spectacular perFormance and perFormance-per-watt gains ever between AMD Opteron processor generations," says Subramanian. While advancing CPU clock frequencies in the same power envelope, it also boosts the level 3-cache size by 200pee cent. This helps speed "up memory-intensive applications like virtualisation, the database and Java, and supports double data rate 2-800 (DDR2¬800) memory, which delivers greater
memory bandwidth than Barcelona ¬- even while using less energy. AMD is planning to bring this processor technology to the desktop PC market by early 2009 under the AMD platForm, codenamed the Dragon.

The new processor has already Found a number of takers. Equipment manuFacturers such as Hp, Dell, IBM and Sun have introduced servers that are compatible with it.