AMD's quad-core Opterons have certainly had a rough life to this point. The original "Barcelona" Opterons were hamstrung by delays, unable to meet clock frequency and performance expectations, and plagued by a show-stopper bug that forced AMD largely to stop shipments of the chips for months while waiting for a new revision, as we first reported. Once the revised Opterons made it into the market, they faced formidable competition from Intel's 45nm "Harpertown" Xeons, whose best-in-class performance and much-improved power efficiency have stolen quite of a bit of the Opteron's luster.

AMD is looking to reverse its fortunes with the introduction of a brand-new version of the quad-core Opteron, code-named Shanghai, which has been manufactured using a new, smaller 45-nanometer fabrication process that should bring gains in power efficiency and clock speeds. Shanghai also has the considerable benefit of being the second generation of a new processor design, and AMD has taken the opportunity to tweak this design in innumerable ways, large and small, in order to improve its performance and, one would hope, allow it more fully to meet its potential. The result is an Opteron processor with higher clock speeds, improved performance per clock, and lower power consumption—a better proposition in almost every way than Barcelona.

You can read the entire article at The Tech Report.