AMD would be releasing its first desktop processors based on the 45nm silicon fabrication process, based on the newer Deneb core. The company is said to have made several tweaks to the original K10 design and equipped the core with 300% the amount of L3 cache as its 65nm Agena parts. The only thing got us wondering was what would be its nomenclature like? Well, be surprised to know that after Phenom X4 9000 series, the company plans to continue the numbering with a 5-digit model number scheme with x1000 unit deviations between models. A rather confusing naming scheme, as suggested by the chart provided, seems to have been adopted.

It is now clear, that there will be two distinct kinds of Phenom X4 45nm chips: those which continue support for DDR2 memory on the existing AM2/AM2+ sockets, and those which are exclusive to the AM3 socket and feature support for DDR3 memory, DDR3 1333MHz at that. The processors would feature dual 64-bit memory controllers, which could be ganged for a single 128-bit wide memory interface, or un-ganged to step up multi-tasking efficiency.The first two Phenom parts out are, Phenom X4 20350, clocked at 2.80 GHz, and a higher model, Phenom X4 20550, clocked at 3.00 GHz. Both these parts are DDR2 compatible which extends the life of current AM2/AM2+ platform. Both have rated TDP of 125W. This is an improvement over the 65nm parts, which had a third of the amount of L3 cache and the 2.60 part being rated at 140W.

Next up, is a fleet of AM3 socket processors that use DDR3-1333 as the memory standard. Their nomenclature starts from the 16xxx range, extending up to 20xxx depending on the clock speed. It can be seen that the parts with a full 8 MB cache (4x 512 KB L2 + 6 MB L3) feature a 20xxx number, while those based on the Propus core which lack L3 caches, feature a total of 2 MB cache (4x 512 KB), have 16xxx series number depending on their clock speeds. Interestingly, there's a part with 3 MB cache featured. We're not sure how the math works out. Finally, 45nm Phenom X3 parts are listed, with their two kinds of cores depending on the presence of L3 caches. They use 14xxx for those with the L3 cache (Heka core), and 12xxx for those without them (Rana core). As you can see, the model numbers are now a complete deviation from the PRN system AMD used only an year ago with its Athlon 64 X2 chips. Also mentioned are their tentative release dates. AM2+ Deneb chips are just around the corner.