AMD appears to be staggering its 45nm quad-core desktop processor release schedule. It's preparing to release one this quarter, but the next two won't ship until toward the end of the year - before January 2009, is what the chip maker's said to be telling mobo makers.

First up, there's the successor to the current Phenom X4 9750, a 125W beast that will be superseded later this quarter by a 45nm version of the chip. The new 9750 will only consume 95W. So say said industry sources, cited by a variety of Chinese-language websites.

The current 9750 is clocked at 2.4GHz, and contains 2MB of L2 cache and and 2MB of L3 cache. Its successor is said to contain 6MB of L3 and be clocked in the 2.4-2.7GHz range, which suggests to us it'll have a model number somewhat higher than 9750.

Later in the year, we'll see a 45nm, 95W successor to the 125W 9850, again with three times the L3 cache of the current version. To the new 9850, we can also add a 45nm version of the as-yet-unlaunched 9950, the moles maintain.

AMD's desktop roadmap also calls for the Q3 launch of the tri-core 2.2GHz Phenom X3 8550, filling the empty space between the current 8450 and 8650. Expect to see the arrival of the low-power 8450e, 9150e and 9350e in Q3 too.

These are 65nm parts - 45nm low-power quad-cores, codenamed 'Propus', will apparently debut some time in H1 2009.