Company AMD is ready to challenge the six-core processor Intel Gulftown with its own desktop creation, named Thuban. Wikipedia reports that Thuban, or Alpha Draconis is a star 3rd magnitude star in the constellation of the Dragon.

It is well known that it is now AMD selects the code names for their processors among the names of stars and constellations, at least, is the only version which can explain the appearance of such names as Deneb, Heka and Callisto.

According to the latest known schemes, Issue CPU AMD Thuban is scheduled for the second quarter of 2010, and the source contends that the six-core 45nm processor with support for DDR3-1333, which will be designed for motherboards with socket AM3. In addition, we know only that future processors will have a 6Mb cache. One can assume that this will be version Istanbul with socket AM3, and probably with a higher frequency.