The wait is finally over. Shanghai is here. Today with much-fanfare AMD delivered its latest baby -- 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, codenamed Shanghai. So what's special about Shanghai? Well, it might turn AMD's fortunes. It delivers up to 35 percent more performance with up to a 35 percent decrease in power consumption at idle. According to AMD, the newest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor can help drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexities with innovations that offer superior virtualization performance and increased performance-per-watt.

The processor offers a 200 percent increase in Level 3 cache size to 6MB to help speed memory-intensive applications like virtualization, database, and Java, and AMD Direct Connect Architecture with coherent HyperTransport 3.0 technology, providing up to 17.6GB/s of bandwidth for processor-to-processor communication.

And thanks to some in-house innovations, the Shanghai reduces power consumption to a great extent. AMD Smart Fetch technology can help reduce power consumption by allowing cores to enter a “halt” state during processing idle times with zero impact on application performance and compliments AMD CoolCore technology, which reduces power to unused sections of each processor to further reduce power consumption.

The latest Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors at the 75-watt ACP ranging from 2.3 to 2.7 GHz are available immediately, with enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt) and SE (105-watt) processors planned to follow in Q1 2009.