Got 2 Grand? AMD Shanghai Chips Begin Appearing at Online Resellers

Race fans, fire up your wallets! AMD’s first 45nm chip, the Shanghai quad-core has finally made its appearance at online resellers.

These bad boys aren’t cheap, either. The quad-core 2.7GHz chip will run potential buyers $2,499 over at PC Connection and $2,240 (for the chip without any fan) over at Buy.com. And these prices are pretty standard all the way across the board.

Admittedly, expectations might be low for these chips considering the debacle caused by the massive delays of Barcelona due to the production issues. Still, AMD’s hopes remain high. Shanghai is currently in full production, and supposed to have a 20 percent performance boost over Barcelona. There have also been confirmations from the likes of Sun Microsystems for plans to offer the chip in current x64 platforms that are running Barcelona by as early as Q1 2009.

While these chips do offer surprisingly low power consumption for a quad core chip (only 75 watts) and some burly clock speeds, the prices are pretty difficult to swallow. Although, to be fair, they’re meant for servers… or badasses.

Image Credit: Chip-Architect.com