Shanghai is here and it is incredibly power efficient.  AnandTech has published their look at this new server chip and it is going to make a lot of people very happy (unless they work for Intel as Josh points out on our new Podcast).  As far as performance is concerned, they are faster than Barcelona, mainly due to increased clock speeds.  When you look at the charts comparing performance per watt, Shanghai stands way above the competition, especially when you are looking at systems with a lot of RAM.  See the benchmarks for yourself.

“As you’ve seen, AMD is still competitive with Intel’s 3.0 GHz Harpertown in the database workloads that we’ve shown here. We were quite surprised that Shanghai was able to meet and, in some cases, pass Harpertown at various workload levels in some of the benchmarks. Obviously, when it comes to power, AMD is still leading this space by a significant margin. FB-DIMMs obliterate any power efficiency in Intel’s processors, especially when you have eight (or more in some cases) of them present in a server.

What about how Shanghai fairs against its older brother Barcelona? Well, in some cases, the gain is clearly just the increased clock speed. However, in others Shanghai achieves an increase of anywhere from 10-15% over and above the clock speed difference. It’s obvious that Shanghai is what Intel would call a “Tock” of the clock for the Barcelona architecture, and it is a nice little bump for turning a few knobs and a die shrink. 2009 will be a very interesting year for AMD and Intel. Whether or not Shanghai can hold down the fort until Istanbul comes out remains to be seen.”

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