Barcelona might have been a sullen nightmare for AMD but it seems to have moved on. It has now pinned its hopes on Shanghai, a quad-core processor for the server market, which happens to be its first processor to be synthesized on a 45-nanometer process.

The company has begun shipping Shanghai to its OEM partners. Shanghai will be launched ahead of time, before the end of this year, unlike Barcelona that was plagued by delays.

Pat Patla, general manger of AMD’s server and workstation division, candidly admitted to having learnt a lot from the blunder that was Barcelona. The chip is claimed to be 20% more efficient than Barcelona. AMD has increased the cache memory from 2MB to 6MB. A six-core processor from the AMD stable will be launched in Q4 2009.