With just two strong players among the many in the CPU rat race, the fight for survival is no walk in the park as Intel and AMD fight tooth and nail to be the dominant player in the processor segment. It's really no secret that Intel is currently ruling the roost when they struck gold with their Conroe architecture and now with their Corei7, and have poised themselves on another level altogether.
AMD is not sitting quiet though, and on December 20, 2008, the world finally witnessed the launch of the Phenom II processor (codenamed Deneb) based on the 45nm fabrication process. The first two chips that were launched were the quad cores, the Phenom II X4 920 and 940 (which is the Black Edition); both based on the AM2+ socket. AMD has also sent us their soon to be launched AM3 processor, the Phenom II X4 810, which runs at 2.6GHz and comes with 4MB of L3 cache instead of 6MB.
We'll take a look at AMD's new processor line-up and some of their core features.