According to AMD's latest roadmap for Desktop processors, the company plans to release its first Quad Core processors based on the next-generation K8L architecture, in Q3 of 2007.

The Quad-Core "Altair" series will be the AMD?s most powerful desktop processors. Citing industry sources, HCEPC.com reports that AMD will release Athlon 64 FX and Athlon 64 X4 versions of the quad-core processor. Designed for performance enthusiasts, the 65nm Athlon 64 FX will offer support for the 4x4 platform, while the Athlon 64 X4 is expected to target the mainstream segment supporting the SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processor) technology.

The Altair series is expected to be clocked at 2.7-2.9GHz, with 512KB L2 Cache for each core. (2MB L2 Cache in total) and shared 2M L3 Cache. Besides, Altair will support AMD's Hyper-Transport 3.0 technology which doubles the Bus speed up to 4GHz.

At the same period, rival Intel is expected to releases the 45nm Yorkfield Quad 2 Extreme processor.