Just a day before the fourth quarter of the year begins, Advanced Micro Devices reassured its customers and investors that it is on-track to deliver its highly-anticipated code-named Shanghai microprocessors for servers in Q4 2008, just as promised. According to the company, the new chips are already in production and revenue shipments will begin shortly.

“We’re in full production right now in the factory. People will start getting first silicon from the final production very shortly,” said Pat Patla, general manager of AMD’s server and workstation chip business, in an interview with Cnet News web-site.

AMD Opteron “Shanghai” microprocessors are made using 45nm process technology and feature enlarged 6MB level-three cache in addition to improved HyperTransport 3.0 bus. Besides, some other enhancements allow the new chips to offer higher instructions per clock (IPC) throughput compared to currently available AMD Phenom and AMD Opteron processors, which should transform into higher overall performance per clock.

It is absolutely crucial for AMD to start shipments of the new “Shanghai” processors on time and also to ensure that its performance and power consumption are competitive when compared to Intel Xeon central processing units.

But while the company seems to be on-track to initiate commercial shipments of its quad-core server chips made using 45nm process technology in Q4 2008, the chipmaker will only be able to release its desktop CPUs manufacturer using the same fabrication process in early 2009.

Tags: AMD, Opteron, Shanghai, 45nm