Sources close to AMD are happy to report that Deneb is up and running. Deneb is the semi-fictional 45nm quad-core product that AMD plans to ship in Q4.

The samples of these CPUs have been out since March, but retail production starts in Q4 2008. We expect some decent frequencies and maybe even 3GHz by the end of the year, but really healthy volumes are expected in Q1 2009.

AMD showed Deneb to many customers during its Malaga "we are fine" event, but they didn't show any benchmarks.

Deneb will have to go against Nehalem and, clock to clock, it definitely loses; but AMD’s hope is that their chip is much smaller and they pray that Intel will have some problems with either QDI, memory controller or native quad-core with eight threads. So far, it looks that Intel has a solid CPU.