Shanghai – World’s 1st 45nm Monolithic Quad Core x86 CPU – October, 2008
In sports, particularly Baseball, its often said that the longer a record is to say, they less impressive it is. ‘Most Home Runs Ever’ is much more of an impressive record then ‘Most Home runs in the 7th inning against a left handed pitcher with a runner on 3rd’ Both are of course records, the first, many may even know the answer (Barry Bonds), the second? I’m sure someone can look it up but I have no idea.
So when I got this interesting commemorative AMD Opteron Sample it seems fitting to break down the record engraved on it ‘Shanghai – World’s 1st 45nm Monolithic Quad Core x86 CPU – October, 2008’ That seems impressive, and the reality is that it was (and is) and its a testament to the very hard work the design team, whose names are engraved for perpetuity on the chip, put into it. The Shanghai was a third gen Opteron that followed the very troubled Barcelona, so it was really a make or break design for AMD.
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9100 QAVK Engineering Sample – Dual 45nm dies – Mid 2008
The most impressive aspect of the record is ‘First monolithic quad core x86 CPU.’ This was putting 4 x86 cores on a single die. Now Shanghai wasn’t the first to do this, as Barcelona had done so previously, thus the addition of ’45nm’ to the record. Barcelona was made on a 65nm process whereas Shanghai shrank that to 45nm. At the time Intel had the Quad-Core Clovertown Xeons (65nm) and had (in 2007) just released the Harpertown/Yorkfield Quad-Cores made on a new 45nm process. All of these used two dual core dies in a single package. Intel was able to catch up later with the Nehalem based processors in 2009.
Was there other single die Quad-cores at the time? What if we look outside of the realm of x86? In 2008 IBM released the z10 quadcore processor, it was a single die, running at up to 4.4GHz (!) but it was made on a 65nm process. Likewise, the UltraSPARC T2 was a 8-core CPU from 2007 but again, only on a 65nm process. Freescale released the 45nm quadcore, single die P3 series P2040 PowerPC processors, but in 2010. MIPS had the quadcore 1004K in 2008 but only on 65nm. So it seems AMD may have had a better record then they thought.
What if we stretch what we call a processor? There were at the time some fairly simple large multicores like the Tilera TILE64 (64-basic 32-bit cores) made on 45nm process, but they are less of a general purpose CPU. Perhaps the closest is the Sony CELL Processor in the Playstation 3, which IBM was moving to 45nm in 2008 and had 1x PowerPC core + 7 SPEs. Perhaps AMD could have made a claim to the first 45nm single die CPU ever, even including non-x86 chips.
