AMD Shanghai is the codename for a new enterprise processor the company is working on. It is a monolithic quad-core x86 processor that retains the design methodology of the K10h generation of AMD processors. It carries forward the Opteron brand. This time around, the company promises to have made numerous changes, big and small, learning from the shortfalls of the Barcelona chip. Shanghai will be the first 45nm AMD processor to make it to the market. Originally slated for Q1, 2009 its launch was pushed to Q4, 2008.

In a press event held yesterday, the company claimed that the company is all set to roll out the new chip. Initial volumes of the processor would run off existing core logic platforms by NVIDIA and Broadcom. It will retain the Socket F (aka s1207) package and support DDR2 memory. The lineup shows that most of these chips would retain the 2000 MT/s system bus, and all of them come with 6 MB of level 3 cache. A new company slide sourced by C|Net shows that the Opteron processor could embrace DDR3 memory only by 2010, with the introduction of the Magny-Corus 12-core processor architecture. Until then, the Istanbul 6-core processor the is slated for H2, 2009, could be the company's flagship product.