After my "client" briefing with AMD's Pat Moorhead, I left his nice suite at the top floor of the W hotel for a tiny room several floors below where the server roadmap update was being held. Funny when you think that AMD's server business fares much better against its competition than the "client" offering. Anyway, the server "guys" apparently didn't mind!

"We're in a good position from a performance and power perspective. Our 65-nm is really beating the comparable Intel 45-nm products today. In Q4, we get to Shanghai that gives 45-nm on the server. So that lead that we have in performance and power savings gets increased even more as we get in the back-end of the year... overall we expect performance [for Shanghai], depending on the workload, to be anywhere from 15-30% [better than Barcelona]", said John Fruehe, AMD's Worldwide Business Development Manager for the Server and Workstation Business.

Here are my key takeaways from the server briefing:

- AMD's 65-nm Opteron "Barcelona" is already outperforming Intel's current 45-nm Xeon "Harpertown". Barcelona successor, 45-nm Shanghai, is expected in Q408 and will widen the performance/power consumption gap with Intel's chip for the 2P server space. Intel's new 6-core chip, Dunnington, is aimed at the 4P+ space;

- WIth Shanghai, AMD is also introducing a server chipset for the first time since Opteron's introduction 5 years ago;

- Fiorano is AMD's first server platform (CPU+chipset+reference design) expected to ship by mid-2009 and follows AMD's platforms for desktops (Spider) and Laptops (Puma). According to AMD, OEMs want a single point of contact and accountability to deliver more reliable products, quicker;

- The 12-cores "Magny Cours" chip with DDR3 support will launch next year as well as an update of the server platform (Maranello);

- Enterprises will probably take time to qualify Nehalem servers which will delay adoption to the 2010 time frame. Also the choice of the much more expensive DD3 memory standard for Nehalem will put Nehalem servers at a competitive disadvantage. At least, that's what AMD hopes!

And here's the video of the server roadmap update: