It looks that Shanghai for servers actually has much to offer and that AMD’s memory interface really plays an important role against Harpertown-based Quad-core server than we expected. The 45nm Shanghai with 4x512KB L2 cache and 6MB of shared L3 cache shows hard time even to mighty Dunnington, the six-core server CPU.

We looked at the spec.org scores of the Spec 2006 test and it looks that Shanghai at the same frequency is about fifteen percent better than Barcelona, which is certainly better than most expected.

Using Specint_rate2006, an integer test, at the same frequency, Shanghai is about the same performance as Harpertown. This would likely be true for database applications, but you cannot really be sure based only on this numbers. For HPC applications (Using SPECfp_rate2006), Shanghai at 2.7Ghz is faster than all current Intel processors (2-socket and 4-socket). This is something that we haven’t seen coming.

Dunnington should be significantly faster than Shanghai on database applications, but Shanghai will have an advantage in virtualization performance. AMD is also fortunate that 2S Nehalem doesn't come out until Q1 2009 and it might capture a massive market share based on its early arrival. The scores are below and SPECint_rate2006 is an integer test, while SPECfp_rate2006 is a floating point test.

The summary of the scores is below and the rest is here. The bigger is better. 

SPECint_rate2006 (base/peak)           SPECfp_rate2006 (base/peak)

Shanghai 2.7GHz (2384, 2S)                          113/136  105/118
Shanghai 2.7Ghz (8384, 4S)                           202/249  188/210

Barcelona 2.5Ghz (2360, 4S)                          92/106   83/90
Barcelona 2.5Ghz (8360, 4S)                          169/197  153/170

Harpertown 3.2Ghz  (X5482, 2S)                  145/156   86/93
Harpertown 2.66Ghz (E5430, 2S)                  119/129   69/74

Dunnington 2.66Ghz (X7460, 2S)                 144/158  74/78
Dunnington 2.66GHz (X7460, 4S)                267/290 141/154