On the other hand, any attempts by CPUs to handle real time 3D graphics really quickly have, up to now, faltered miserably. So, neither have CPUs replaced GPUs, nor have GPUs come much closer to replacing CPUs. How far along is each camp now? And how will they perform within our crystal ball's prediction capacity horizon of, say six months from now? Let's look at the most favourite common metric between the two camps - the GFLOPS peak floating-point instruction rate, in double-precision of course.

AMD plans to launch two Regor-based 45nm dual core 25W CPUs and originally it planned to launch two CPUs clocked at 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz together. This won't happen as the 1.8GHz one, branded as Athlon II X2 620u is pushed to late Q1 2010.

Remember the xpPhone? The 4.8-inch touchscreen slider has netbook-like specs, some sort of "AMD Super Mobile CPU", and runs a full-blown copy of Windows XP. They've just sent through shots of its phone-function interface…and they actually look pretty good.

If you, however, don't know how to unlock, or even how to get into the BIOS, you still have the best performing single core on the market, that can be used in HTPC, office work or in everyday computer usage. While you didn't spend much money, you also have to acknowledge the fact that this is just a single core processor. Looking back at the performance graphs, it is hard to imagine, that not too long ago we were all computing with such slow CPUs, and today you will be performance limited in almost every aspect with a single threaded CPU. Unlike AMD's new Athlons which are very flexible budget CPUs, the new Semprons have a specific and narrow list of potential buyers.

According to latest plans, AMD plans Thuban for Q2 2010 and we can confirm that this is a six core 45nm CPU with DDR3 1333 support that will fit in AM3 motherboards. The only other known fact is that it will have 6MB cache. To us this looks like Istanbul in AM3 packaging but probably with higher speeds.