AMD has officially unveiled on Thursday its highly-discussed AMD Phenom II central processing unit (CPU) along with the code-named Dragon platform for gamers. The heart of the Dragon platform is AMD Phenom II X4 processor previously code-named Deneb. This provides a substantial performance uplift, and that's because it has a 6MB level-three cache, some improvements of micro-architecture, clock-speed increase thanks to the 45nm process technology as well as future support for DDR3 memory.

Big PC manufacturers, such as Dell and HP, plan to offer the Dragon platform technology-based desktop systems in the first quarter of 2009, with Dell offering immediate availability in its Dell XPS desktop line. Along with the new processors, AMD will also bring a new CPU naming scheme that is completely different compared to the one that the company uses today. The new model looks a lot easier for understanding, but it will certainly cause some confusion on the market.

The Phenom II X4 is AMD's first line of CPUs built with the 45nm technology. This way, the company continues its battle with Intel for the CPU space, but it remains to be seen if AMD will manage to outsell its rival's processors.

The AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition (3.0GHz) will be available for a price around $275 and the AMD Phenom II X4 920 (2.8GHz) will be available for a price around $235, both of them from AMD channel e-tailers. As for the all-AMD system, the Dragon platform, consisting of the new AMD Phenom II X4 processor, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB graphics card and the AMD 790GX motherboard and 4 GB of DDR2-1066 memory, it can be found for approximately $900, according to the company.