As things goes, Intel weren't the only ones having an event in Taipei this week, as AMD was also on a quick visit and we managed to sneak in and listen to what they had to say. Although most of the event was about potentially new CPU thermal designs, AMD also shared a bit more information about its upcoming Opteron products.

The new Shanghai core is set to launch within weeks from now, so it might not be this month as many have believed. The new processors will be drop-in compatible with current motherboards which will make them a relatively affordable upgrade.

With the Shanghai core, AMD has added support for DDR2 800MHz memory, a 6MB L3 cache, support for Hyper Transport 3.0, improved virtualization technology, and let's not forget the shrink for 65nm to 45nm, which should make these processors less power hungry.

As you might have gathered by now, some of the features won't be supported by older chipsets, such as HT 3.0, and the bad news in this case is that you'll have to wait until sometime near the middle of next year before AMD will have a supporting chipset ready.

When AMD launches the Fiorina platform, these new processors should get a further speed bump with the help of the SR5960 and SP5100 chipsets from AMD, and the company will also release a six-core Opteron which is codenamed Istanbul later in 2009.

In 2010 AMD will be shifting its Opteron platform to socket G34 on the Maranello platform; and the company is also planning on launching its Magny-Cours generation of processors in the middle of 2010, with the Sao Paulo being the first CPU on the list.