Leslie Sobon proudly displayed AMD's key assets - a silicon wafer containing 45nm 'Shanghai' Phenom quad-core CPUs, fresh out of Fab 36.
The Shanghai core - code-named K10.5 - is rumoured to bring around 10 per cent clock-for-clock performance advantages over the incumbent K10, with the chips endowed with a healthy 6MiB of on-silicon L3 cache, up from the 2MiB on current 65nm models.
Intel made the transition to the energy-efficient 45nm manufacturing process in 2007. AMD's gone about it in a slightly different way but should be on-track for full-scale production later on this year.
We're rather more interested in 'Montreal' - the current codename for twin Shanghai dies in one multi-chip package....
