Vanoy Wong, AMD Corporate Vice President and General Manager of AMD Greater China speaks at the ceremony.

At the event, Shanda Games awarded AMD as “the Most Trustworthy Technical Partner”. AION, operated by Shanda Games, is called by some media experts as the most anticipated online game in 2009.

At present, over 2,000 AMD Quad-Core Opteron processors are being employed on the servers supporting AION game. At the same time, Shanda Games has also designated AMD as its strategic CPU and GPU partner for the game.

The number of game players on the first public test day of AION’s debut far exceeded expectation. "Our level of server activity indicates an unprecedented level of player participation on the first public test day in our operation history," according to Ling.

"The AMD Opteron processors ensured the smooth access of players and maintained 24-hour stable operations without any problem, helping Shanda Games to create this new record."

Ling Hai (R), President of Shanda Games gives the award of "the Most Trustworthy Technical Partner" to Spencer Pan, AMD Vice President and General Manager of OEM Business in China.

At the event, AMD demonstrated its six-core Istanbul processor, scheduled for release this June. Istanbul processors are backwards-compatible with the interface of current products. With identical power consumption, Istanbul processor increases performance by 30%.

Vanoy Wong, AMD Corporate Vice President and General Manager of AMD Greater China, said that AMD plans to ship the 12-core processor next year, and the 16-core processor the year after next.

Pat Patla, AMD Vice President and General Manager of the Server and Workstation Business Segment attends the ceremony.

The company is currently working on new processors which we expect will deliver more than 35 times the performance of the original single-core AMD Opteron processor released in 2003, said Pat Patla, AMD Vice President and General Manager of the Server and Workstation Business Segment.

AMD Opteron processors enhanced AMD's position in the industry. In 2003 when the chip industry was transitioning from 32-bit computing to 64-bit Computing, Intel announced that it would develop pure 64-bit Intel Itanium processor (not backwards-compatible with 32-bit computing), and postpone the development of backwards-compatible 64-bit processor.

However, AMD launched the first Opteron processor, which supported both 64-bit and 32-bit computing, gaining a favorable position in the competition. Industry experts have pointed out that the computer industry would not have entered the 64-bit age in such a short time without the AMD Opteron processor, and it has enabled AMD to enter the high-end server market and begin to compete with Intel on all fronts.