AMD will release its 45mn CPUs somewhere in the third or fourth quarter of 2008. The 45nm AMD CPU which seems to be almost identical to the B3 stepping of Socket 1207 Opteron (Barcelona) was codenamed Shanghai. Nevertheless those two CPUs are not alike, because Barcelona has its HyperTransport 3.0 clock generator fused off, while Shanghai would have it unblocked.
Sources close to AMD and motherboard manufacturers confirmed that starting with the release of the Shanghai series, the HT3.0 will only be used for inter-CPU communication. That leads to new possibilities for performance. A new "native six-core" Shanghai derivative, codenamed Istanbul could be the first response to Intel's six-core, 45nm Dunnington processor.
Accordingly to DailyTech, AMD told that Shanghai and its derivatives will get twin-die per package treatment. That means we could see twin-die Istanbul processors integrating 12 cores in a single package. Obviously, each of these cores will communicate to each other via the HT3.0 interconnect on the processor. The bad news is that in order to upgrade to Shanghai 45nm processors there is needed an upgrade for the Socket 1207 motherboard.
via Warepin
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