AMD’s upcoming Phenom revamp, based on the introduction of the Socket AM3 interconnect, will indeed be dubbed the ‘Phenom II’ while versions of the family will become the first three- and four-core Athlons.
According to Asian industry moles cited by Chinese-language site HKEPC, the upcoming Athlon X2, X3 and X4 will contain - as their names suggests - two, three an four processing cores. To distinguish them from similarly styled Phenom IIs, they’ll lack an L3 cache. The three new Athlons are codenamed ‘Regor’, ‘Rana’ and ‘Propus’, and all but Regor were, only a month or so back, expected to debut as Phenom-brand parts.
Both ‘Heka’ and ‘Deneb’ - respectively, three- and four-core AM3 CPUs - will still debut as Phenoms, but now as Phenom II xxx chips rather than Phenon 20xxx products.
