AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3

Back in 2008, we talked a few times about AMD's Propus chip - basically a Deneb with no L3 cache and 5-10% lower performance in desktop applications - and how important it is to AMD's prospects in the desktop market. Now Fudzilla claims a 45W EE SKU is slated for early Q2 and others for early Q3.

This is certainly later than we had hoped (heck, initially we were so optimistic we thought it would be released sometime in Q4 - oops!) but at least it catches the Back-to-School OEM cycle perfectly, assuming this leak is correct (we think it is, and Fudo was the first to talk about Propus). This chip should be much more competitive than Barcelona or even Deneb from a perf/dollar point of view. It's unlikely to be low enough power for the notebook market however (and it turns out L3 might actually save power there, since it minimizes external memory accesses), and doesn't seem to make any sense for servers.

We'll see what happens, but given Intel's delays for some Nehalem chips recently and a couple of other factors, AMD's position in 2H09 could be an awful lot worse. Whether they can maintain that position in 2010 following Intel's 32nm ramp appears highly unlikely, but it's hard to say just how bad it's going to get.