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.
At PC Online they have published benchmarks with a K10-based processor they claim to be using AMD’s Propus architecture. Exactly which Athlon X4 model they have is a bit hard to say since it is running at 2.8GHz, but with 2MB L2 cache the rest of the specifications seem to match. The processor is runs on a DDR2 endowed 790FX motherboard. The multi-threaded Cinebench R10 benchmarks shows 8738 points, which is not enough to match the older Phenom X4 9750 (2.4GHz) that scored close to 9500 points in the same test. More benchmarks can be found over at PC Online.
The first Energy Efficient model, called Athlon X4 605e, running at 2.5GHz and only consuming 65W, will appear in April. This model can be the first to reach the market as it will be announced in April as well, but may become available in stores as soon as before the end of March.
Below is a table summarizing the results from the test with AMD’s coming 45nm processors published at PC Online.
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