A big chunk of AMD's K10 is the L3 cache memory, and from what AMD told us some time ago, the L3 cache doesn’t actually boosts the performance all that much.

AMD's K10 CPU has 2x64KB L1 cache for data + instructions, each core has 512KB of L2 cache and 2MB of shared L3 cache.

When you take out the L3 cache, on average you will lose 5 to 10 percent performance. The most affected applications will be some synthetic benchmarks such as Sysmark. In real life you will barely notice the difference.

That is how the Propus K10.5 45nm quad-core without L3 cache was born and this chip is significantly smaller than the Deneb K10.5, 45nm quad-core with 6MB of L3 cache. In the semiconductor industry smaller usually means cheaper and more chips per wafer, which brings us to the fact that it makes more financial sense.

Propus might be AMD’s way to come back to the game, as it should be fast and likely affordable.