American chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has this week officially released a set of Phenom II processors which include a brand new 45nm triple-core offering.

The five new Phenom II chip entrants include three quad-core platforms, which are in:

-2.6GHz X4 810

-2.6GHz X4 910

-2.5GHz X4 805

The inbound triple-core chips are:

- 2.8GHz X3 720 (Black Edition)

- 2.6GHz X3 710

The Phenom IIs are built on a 45nm process and use less power, at 95 watts, than previous Phenoms which needed 125 watts. This new memory controller allows the processor to run both DDR2 and DDR3 memory kits, which is good news for AMD as up to a 5% performance boost can be seen when running DDR3 memory on Phenom II processors. The company's Phenom II quad-core and triple-core chips include DDR3 memory controllers, which allow data to be passed between the CPU and memory faster than existing DDR2 controllers.

David Schwarzbach, a product marketing director at AMD, says the company will continue to upgrade to faster speeds throughout the year since the current chip design has a lot of headroom.