The company reportedly told its partners about the AMD Phenom X3 chip at a closed meeting, explaining that the chipmaker plans to release such a product because of 'market demand'.

The new triple-core microprocessors will feature its own design and will not be quad-core chips with one core disabled, according to the web-site. Nevertheless, the chips will still include 2MB of shared L3 cache and will take advantage of other K10 micro-architecture features, such as SSE4A instruction set, 128-bit floating point units (FPU) and so on. Obviously, the chips will also have advanced power management capabilities.

* Update - it's likely a real three core CPU, not a quad with one core disabled.