The first three-core to launch in February will be the Heka based 45nm quad-core with 7.5MB total cache and up to 2.8GHz clock speeds. The 7.5MB number comes from 3x512KB cache per core and 6MB L3 shared cache. This CPU will come in AM3 packaging, support both DDR3 and DDR2 memory and platforms. This CPU will be branded as Phenom II X3 700 series.

At some point in April, AMD will launch Rana three-core that is based on Propus core, with one core disabled. Just like Propus, Rana won't have any L3 cache and it will only come with 3x512KB; and we were told that we shouldn't see a big performance decrease compared to the one with L3 cache.

This CPU should also clock to 2.8GHz and it will end up branded as Athlon X3 400 series and comes wrapped up in a do-more-than dual-core message.

Apart from the Athlon/Phenom branding confusion, we also wonder why AMD officially embraced the three-core designation, instead of tri-core. Perhaps the fact that Infineon uses the TriCore brand on its CPUs had something to do with it?