Nobody from PCW Towers could make it to today's launch of AMD's Barcelona chips in Barcelona (where else?) and we could find no-one at the company to elucidate a somewhat confusion announcement. The nine new quad-cores all have names of the form 83xx or 23xx. The first digit, according to AMD, indicates the scalability: eight means that number can be used on a single motherboard.

The last two digits indicate relative performance, and the second digit the generation. So, following this logic, all today's processors are third generation.

But, according to an AMD presentation, all the quad-cores including 45nm versions launching next year, are second generation and the third generation will come in 2009 with the launch of 45nm octal-cores. And yet another AMD paper refers to them as fourth-generation, though this could relate to the manufacturing process used. We trust that the processors themselves won't get their data so mixed up.