AMD has confirmed that it used Deneb cores for some of its Athlon II processors. This comes as no surprise, as many tweakers around the interweb managed to unlock the disabled L3 cache.

However, some companies have already started using this fact in their marketing, citing that their motherboards can be used to access the inactive L3. This might be true of Deneb-based parts, but you will probably no longer be able to buy them after stock runs out.

Athlon II should have been based on the 169mm Propus die from the beginning, but for some reason it was delayed and appeared as a crippled Deneb with a 258mm die. According to some rumours, AMD used the Propus sied for the energy efficient Athlon II X4 6xxe parts.

Obviously, the significantly reduced die size positively impacts Propus pricing, and Athlon IIs are currently the cheapest 45nm quad-cores on the market.

More here.