System builders have responded positively to Shanghai, the code name for AMD’s latest core-processor model ­ with many saying it is far better than the previous Barcelona platform.

AMD has promised Shanghai will be the best platform for virtualisation performance and easy live migration. But following disappointment with Barcelona, many system builders questioned whether the new 45nm design could produce the industry’s fastest stable x86 server platform architecture so far.

Global OEMs are expected to immediately offer enterprise and SME customers more than 25 systems, available between now and the end of the year, based on the 45nm quad-core AMD Opteron processor.

The main improvements are expected to be the 45nm process, an improved prefetch, increased and improved caching, faster virtualisation and a new energy-efficient, cache-saving feature called Smart Fetch.

Subhas Patel, managing director of system builder Satine Interactive said that, despite being a “shrunken version” of the Barcelona chip (down from 65nm), the Opteron is solid.

Randy Allen, senior vice president at AMD’s computing solutions group, added: “Opteron gives the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products for four years.”

Though AMD is overshadowed by Intel, it leads on virtualisation, said Patel. The biggest improvement AMD has achieved is in shortening the switch time on virtual machines. This could have massive benefits for companies that use virtualisation to host multiples of different systems, he claimed.

If every virtual machine’s switch time is improved by a quarter, the ramifications for the entire server are massive, explained chief technology officer of web host Strato, Julien Ardisson.

Berlin-based Strato is the earliest adopter of Opteron, with new servers using the new Opteron processors. The processors give more processing power per watt, said Ardisson, and the energy intake adjusts to the load on the processors.

“These processors perform well while using little energy. We will have no trouble switching to the new server generation.”