Chip minnow AMD is reported by Chinese language website HKEPC.com to be about to release the first of its new 45-nanometre quad-core CPUs codenamed Deneb.

Up until now, AMD has struggled against the weight and performance of faster 45-nanometre chips from rival Intel while having to compete with only 65-nanometre chips of its own.

The new Deneb series should bring AMD closer to a level playing field with its major rival.

First quad-core chips for AM2+ boards

The first of those quad-core chips are slated to arrive in the fourth quarter of this year, delivering 2.6-2.8GHz and 2.8-3.0GHz clock speed with secondary level cache of 2MB and L3 cache of 6MB. They’ll be 125-watt package parts and fit existing AM2+ socketed motherboards. Samples are expected early in fourth-quarter with production expected not long after. Despite the 125-watt TDP (Thermal Design Power) rating, these new CPUs are expected to be manufactured using AMD’s new 45-nanometre process.

New AM3 socket

However, starting in 2009 will be a new socket called AM3. AM3 will enable AMD processor to use DDR3 for the first time.

Two Deneb parts are expected to arrive in the first quarter, one operating at 2.4-2.6GHz and the other 2.5-2.8GHz. They’ll feature the same clock speeds as the AM2+ chips and the same cache memory amounts. The difference is that these parts will come with a 95-watt rating, which should be indicative of a move to 45nm manufacture.

Also during this quarter, AMD will release new Propus-codename quad-core CPUs for the budget market. These will effectively be Deneb CPUs with no L3 cache memory and only 2MB of L2 cache. The TDP of these chips drops down to 95-watts thanks to the lack of cache memory.

By second-quarter 2009, two faster Deneb chips will be released running at 2.6-2.8GHz and 2.8-3.0GHz for the new AM3 socket. These chips will also be rated at 125-watts TDP.

During this time, lower-power Propus quad-core chips will be released with clock speeds of 2.3-2.6GHz and 2.1-2.4GHz. The faster of the two is expected to be built into a 65-watt TDP package and the slower will have a rating of just 45-watts TDP, one of if not the lowest quad-core TDP rating so far.

However, it will be interesting to see how these Propus CPUs perform with such little cache memory. The 2MB level is currently as low as Intel offers on its dual-core CPUs and unless more applications are released that support multi-core CPUs (Photoshop CS3 doesn’t support multi-core), the overall performance of Propus may well be disappointing.

According to reports, AMD has yet to confirm the report.