AMD is planning to launch a Rana-based 45nm triple-core at 3.1GHz, and it plans to brand it Athlon II X3 445.

Athlon II will be the brand for the L3 cacheless Propus quad-core, Rana three-core and Regor dual-core, of course with suitable suffix such as X4 for quad, X3 for three and X2 for dual.

The three core will have unimpressive 95W TDP, 3.1GHz clock speed and 3x512KB L2 cache, and yet again 0MB L3. We believe that Athlon II generation will generally be affordable, but we are having trouble understanding how AMD plans to make money out of these ultra cheap CPUs.

With  Intel’s Core i5 and soon to launch Core i3, AMD will have a tough task to compete, especially since Intel is usually faster at a similar price.