Samsung this week announced the S5P6440, which is the company's latest ARM11 processor and the first to be designed using a 45nm lower power CMOS process technology.

"Today's ultra-competitive consumer electronics market demands rapid performance upgrades and effective cost reduction to continue its expansion," said Dr. Kwang-hyn Kim, Senior VP of Sales and Marketing at Samsung Electronics' System LSI division.

The new chip is based on an ARM1175 CPU core, which runs at either 533MHz or 667MHz. A 64-bit AXI bus running at 166MHz connects the core and all on-chip hardware accelerators and peripheral interfaces. In addition, the S5P6440 boasts 2Dgraphics acceleration hardware compliant with the OpenVG API standard, enabling graphical goodies like alpha blending for transparency effects, anti-aliasing, and vector graphics support.

Samsung says it has begun sampling the new ARM11 processor to key customers and will start volume shipments sometime in Q3 of this year.

AMD already offers a handful of chips built on a 45nm manufacturing process, but if what motherboard makers are telling news and rumor site DigiTimes turns out to be true, the No. 2 chip maker will fully embrace 45nm for its desktop parts next quarter. These include dual-core Phenom II X2 500 series and Athlon II X2 200 series in June, followed by quad-core Athlon II X4 600 series and triple-core Athlon II X3 400 series in September.

In addition, AMD has a few new CPUs on tap for an end of Q2 / beginning of Q3 release. DigiTimes says we'll see the Phenom X2 550 and 545 both launch by the end of the second quarter, and the quad-core Phenom II X4 945 (95W) and 8xx (95W), triple-core Phenom II X3 7xx (95W), quad-core Athlon II X4 630 and 620, triple-core Athlon II X3 435 and 425, and dual-core Ahtlon II X2 250, 245, and 240 all in the third quarter. This in addition to 10 low-power CPUs.

Forget about chocolate, flowers, or diamonds, because the real buying decision come Valentine's Day will be what processor to indulge in. It's no stretch to say the entire tech world will remain infatuated with Intel's Core i7 platform by the time February rolls around, but Intel won't be the only one trying to woo consumers. According to DigiTimes, motherboard manufacturers are busy preparing for a sextuplet of 45nm quad-core AM3-based CPUs from AMD in February.

• Phenom II X4 710 (2.6GHz, 6MB L3 cache)
• Phenom II X4 720 (2.8GHz, 6MB L3 cache)
• Phenom II X4 805 (2.5GHz, 4MB L3 cache)
• Phenom II X4 810 (2.6GHz, 4MB L3 cache)
• Phenom II X4 910 (2.6GHz, 6MB L3 cache)
• Phenom II X4 925 (2.8GHz, 6MB L3 cache)

The same sources that have been whispering sweet-somethings to DigiTimes also say that AMD will follow up it's busy February release schedule with more 45nm CPUs in April, but they won't be Phenom parts. Instead, look for Athlon-branded chips without the shared L3 cache. Additionally, the chip maker plans to release the quad-core Athlon X4 600 family and tri-core Athlon X3 family at the same time. And if you can wait until June, sources say AMD will introduce it's 45nm dual-core Athlon X2 200 series.