Shanghai Tested: Both Performance and Power Enhancements Spotted

We've mentioned this morning that today is the big day for AMD's Shanghai server chip, and we return to the product now to announce the first benchmark test results. As said before, Advanced Micro Devices launched nine flavors of the new chip, all in the 75W area. The already announced new features and technology enhancements the chip comes with have been proved in testing to do what they were meant to do from the beginning: the chip delivers more performance than its predecessors and runs even better than Intel's Xeons. AMD previously said that the new quad-core Opteron would be more power efficient than its Barcelona chip, and early benchmarking shows exactly this. The Shanghai chip is able to offer a 7W power reduction when idling compared to Barcelona, yet the difference rises up to 49W when side by side with a Xeon CPU. The gain over the predecessor is of only 6 percent, but it jumps considerably to 56 percent when compared to an eight DIMM Intel system and to 30 percent when sided to a four DIMM Intel system.