Today, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. begun the shipping of its 45-nm server processor Shanghai, which is a refresh of the company’s Barcelona Opteron chip.

AMD said that the Shanghai Opteron processors are available immediately for all interested parties, adding that the 75-watt versions of the processor range from 2.3GHz to 2.7GHz in clock speed.

AMD claims that Shanghai is about 35 percent faster than Barcelona and the new product is expected to significantly boost the performance for many of the company’s clients.

Barcelona was aimed at finally catching up with main rival Intel in the server market, but after numerous technical problems it was launched eight months behind schedule.

"Virtualization is a heavy memory application, so when you add memory bandwidth you really get an improvement," said Bart Arnold, AMD's director for commercial product marketing, referring to the new processors’ uplift with higher memory. He also explained that Shanghai will be able to provide up to 21 percent CPU power savings, using a key new feature known as "AMD Smart Fetch", which allows a core -rather than just parts of it - to power down automatically once it finishes to write its contents on L1 and L2 to the shared L3 cache. The technology allows a reduction of up to 15 watts of system level power consumption.

"We're expecting Shanghai to really reach out and capture the leadership position," added Mr. Arnold, being extremely confident in the company’s new product.

Enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron HE (55-watt – the energy-efficient version) and SE (105-watt – the high power frequency-optimized version) processors are currently in development and AMD announced that they are scheduled for release sometime in the first quarter of 2009.

Quad-core chip Shanghai is designed for use on servers. A PC version called Deneb is scheduled also for the first quarter of 2009. The more cores that can be fitted onto a piece of silicon, the more calculations a computer is theoretically able to process simultaneously.

The competition in the lucrative server market will remain tight. In September, Intel presented its Xeon 7400, a server processor with six cores, which is soon to be delivered to clients like Dell, HP, IBM and Sun Microsystems.