The whole AMD world is bracing itself for the release of Phenom II X4 desktop processor which is expected to ship 1st quarter next year. Phenom II X4 processor will be manufactured in 45nm process and touted to overclock up to 4GHz on air cooling alone. Well that’s a lot of overclocking potential once you use liquid nitrogen cooling.
The Phenom II X4 is a quad-core part initially released for the Socket-AM2+ platform, but eventually it will be a Socket-AM3 part with DDR3 support. The Deneb core is a Phenom II X4 with 8MB of L3 cache and the Propos version has a 2MB cache. Both of these cores have integrated DDR2 memory controllers, with a transition to DDR3 sometime in 2010.
Intel’s Core i7 desktop processor codenamed Nehalem is already released this week with integrated DDR3 memory making it almost twice as fast as the current Phenom processors. This will be a great challenge for AMD who is now struggling financially due to lower demand for its processors. Nevertheless AMD has also made available the new Opteron line of processors codenamed Shanghai for server to compete against Intel Xeon.
