Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has officially unveiled on Thursday its highly-anticipated AMD Phenom II central processing unit (CPU) along with the code-named Dragon platform for gamers. The company hopes this will hit the market and return the company's microprocessors inside gamers' and entertainment enthusiasts personal computers.

Basically, the heart of the AMD 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.  AMD expects about 20% real-world performance increase of the new central processing units (CPUs) compared to predecessors.

However, AMD says that the full power and speed of its new Dragon can only be obtained if users use an all-AMD platform, which consists of an AMD Phenom II, AMD 7-series core-logic and an ATI Radeon HD 4800-series graphics card. AMD's own core-logic sets enable higher overclocking potential compared to third-party solutions.

Meanwhile, big PC manufacturers, like Dell and HP, plan to offer Dragon platform technology-based desktop systems in the first quarter of 2009, with Dell offering immediate availability in its Dell XPS desktop line. Furthermore, 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 really looks a lot easier for understanding, but it will certainly cause some confusion on the market.

As a bonus, AMD also improved the power consumption by 30 to 50 percent, while boosting performance, on average, by about 20 percent compared to the Phenom 9950, which topped out at 2.6 GHz. This is AMD's first line of CPUs built with 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, unlocked multiplier) 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 that 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 AMD.