With AMD announcing the arrival of the shanghai series of processor, it looks like a fresh battle between Intel and AMD.
We wanted to find out just how good this would be for the Linux world, as Linux has quite a non-ignorable presence on the server end, to say the least. We’re pleased to announce that Shanghai not only worked smoothly with Linux, but also scored high on the several acid tests that it was put to.

The shanghai group of processors is a successor to AMD s previous ‘Barcelona’ range. All the specifications clearly indicate that this is a huge improvement over all its predecessors, in every way as we will see now.
Before we spill the beans on the tests, let’s take a look at the specifications of this newbie. In particular, we focus on one member of this family- The AMD opteron 2384.

It’s manufactured using the 45nm Semiconductor fabrication technology which in simple words translates to shorter switching time and better power management. The transistor count has gotten closer to almost a billion (758 million to be exact), almost twice that in the Barcelona. The reason for this is the expansion of the L3 cache to 6 MB. This processor has a clock speed of 2.7 GHz. This apart, the speed for DDR2 memory has been raised up a notch to 800 MHz. In general for the shanghai family, the clock speed varies between 2300 and 2700 MHz while the operating voltage is 1.35V.

Getting back to the testing part, testing was carried out with four Opteron 2384 processors on a Tyan Thunder n3600M motherboard. Apart from a minor upgrade requirement of the BIOS to v2.03, the processors worked fine.

IMAGE PROCESSING TEST
The superior design work on the Shanghai showed clearly when tested with GraphicsMagick. Shanghai was found to be nearly 33% faster than Barcelona. Other variant tests such as image sharpening, resizing and local adaptive threshold, all proved Shanghai to be the clear front runner.

COMPILATION TIME
Tests showed that by using Shanghai, compilation times as low as 27 seconds could be achieved, which was around 18 seconds faster than the Barcelonas could do.
Even while comparing the time to compress files, Shanghai won hands down.
Encoding MP3 files and encrypting mammoth size files were found to be faster to the tune of 20%, when using the Shanghais.

THE BOTTOM LINE
The horde of tests performed on the Shanghai show that this family of processors clearly has huge improvement in performance figures. Couple this with the seamless integration it allows with Linux, you have a good candidate to use in Servers/workstations.
AMD might not be quick enough to beat Intel at shipping their new line, they still do have a good chance to rival them with the good performance-product they have on offer. The price for a single AMD Opteron 2384 is just around $900 USD.

SOURCES:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_shanghai_linux&nu...
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15905
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/18/amd_shanghai_new_chipset/