As far as AMD is concerned, the new year is supposed to bring more than a new stepping of errata-free Barcelona and Phenom chips. The company has confirmed that it has outlined the general plans of shifting the K8 production to the 65-nanometer line, while phasing out the 90nm 6400+ (3.2GHz) and 6000+ (3GHz) products. The new K10 product line details are still kept away, leaving room to plenty of rumors and suppositions.

According to DigiTimes, the second quarter of the year will bring two new chips, the AMD 6050 and 6250. AMD will have yet to detail on the clock speed of the processors in the Kuma line, but it is certain that both chips will feature a 1MB L2 cache and 2MB of shared L3 cache pool. The processors will feature significant performance boosts as compared to Barcelonas and Brisbane (both with the 512K L2 cache), although the K8/K10 architectures have always been reluctant to an increased L2 cache size.

The Kuma processors are expected to witness a core-for-core performance boost of about 5 percent than the clock equivalent Phenoms, but this could change until the chips enter mass production if AMD decides to implement some of the technology dedicated to the 45-nanometer Shanghai line.

If AMD could keep away from the mistakes the company has done with the Barcelona and Phenom quad-core lines, the Kuma processors could even the scores in the competition between AMD and Intel. Should the company succeed in launching a Kuma CPU in the 3.2-3.4GHz range in the second quarter of the year, AMD will be able to set foot on firm ground and recover some of the last year's handicap.

Although Kuma will mark an important milestone in the company's roadmap, the new processor line alone will not perform miracles. Both Kumas and Barcelonas would have to undergo a scaling procedure and a clokspeed boost to stay competitive.