AMD hasn’t made any official announcement yet, but its first 45nm processors have already slipped out on the market just as Intel has let loose its Nehalem architecture, Core i7. You can now find the first Shanghai-based Opteron processors at retailers. The first server processors are only listed in a limited amount of stores, but they can be found at PC Connection and Buy.com. The two series available so far are Opteron 837x and Opteron 838x that with four 45nm cores costs a terrifying amount of money.
The flagship, Opteron 8385, costs north of $2,500 and sports a clock frequency of 2.7GHz and works in the 75W envelope. The only thing separating it from the sibling, Opteron 8384, is a faster bus (HyperTransport 3).
AMD says that the Shanghai manufacturing is coming along nicely and that the official announcement is coming in the middle of November. AMD’s new architecture will offer up to 20% better performance than the current Barcelona architecture at the same clock frequency, says AMD.
The first 45nm processors for the desktop market will not appear until the start of next year. Until then AMD will have to fight Core i7 with its current 65nm Phenom family.
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