AMD Athlon X4 Propus Tested

AMD will soon announce the first Athlon X4 processors and these will be based on AMD's budget chip Propus to become a cheaper quad-core alternative. The biggest difference from the Deneb and Heka architectures used by AMD's Phenom II processors are that the shared L3 cache has been removed in Propus. Athlon X4 will simply have to rely on just the 2MB L2 cache, or in reality 512KB dedicated to each core.

The top models of the Propus family will be called Athlon X4 615 (2.7GHz) and Athlon X4 605 (2.5GHz). Both processors will get a TDP rating of 95W and launch for the AM3 platform in April. Although, rumors claim that these models have been postponed to Q3, 2009.