Tom's Phenom review & conclusion -- wrong?

Q6600 Guarenteed G0s from Clubit.com

$276 Retail
$255 OEM

Atleast they came to the conclusion that the Q6600 was better.

Now if they'd just do some research on pricing for 2 minutes before posting. Or perhaps they are using the numbers from August?

Perhaps you'd like to know how it works.

Vendors buy in bulk of 1000s. They buy it at price X. They then have to sell it off at price X to make a profit.

The G0 Q6600 comes out and has the price of X+20. Vendors again buy in bulk of 1000s and sell it. However they never sold off the first product at X and can't undercut themselves and operate at a loss..

This is a fairly dumb argument. E6600s are already "old" technology and have been replaced by the E6x50 line. Retailers are trying to sell off their stock of E6600s at the price they bought them for.

But hey.. random question. Is selling a 5000+ BE for $130 a rip off compared to the $160 for a retail 6000+? Oh wait.. OH SNAP. The OEM 6000+ is $180. AMD IS RIPPING US OFF.

Was the only price point I could find right now that didn't make sense. I'm glad you chose to ignore the rest of the post though.

When the E6600 was selling at the price it is now the Q6600 was much higher.

It's ok though.. Because if you buy the E6600 over the E6750 or Q6600 you deserve the slap in the face.

I won't really give them stuff about the reject quad thing.

What's an E6400 or 6300? What is the E21x0 series?

Same kinda thing. I do agree with you about changing their stories though.

Yup, Intel sells dead-core chips too- the Core and Core 2 Solo as well as the Celeron D 4xx series (Conroe-L) are Core or Core 2 Duos with a dead core on the die fused off. Intel won't sell a tri-core chip because they can simply put another fully-functional die in with the other fully-functional die when they make the Core 2 Quad MCM. We'll see if Intel sells any tri-core chips once they put all of the cores on the same die in the Nehalem. I personally don't think they will as they will publicly make fun of AMD for selling a "dud quad" chip and don't want to be made fun of for doing the same. They'll likely disable two cores and make a dual. Intel has enough fab capacity that it won't be a big deal to do that.

Now about the E6300 and E6400- it depends on the stepping. The L2 and M0 revisions are perfectly functional chips made on a smaller 111 mm^2 die, as compared to the earlier 144 mm^2 B2-stepping units that had half of the cache fused off. All Pentium Dual Cores have half of the cache fused off, whether it was bad or not.

OK children if you guys play nice together I'll have to take away your CPUs

I dont know....Intel has been playing it reasonably smart since C2D...they seemed to learn from some of their mistakes even if it took losing nearly 30% of the total market to teach them those lessons. Maybe, just maybe, they will learn from AMDs "Quad Core for Dummies" and "Ultimate Enthusiast" platform fiascos and keep their mouths shut. I suspect they will, if only because they havent been playing the smear campaign tactics nearly as agressively as AMD has, and they have far less egg on their faces to show for it. Not to mention, someone at Intel must understand the benefit of recouping some of the investment of a failed monolithic quad.

Certainly a very real possibility. In terms of consumer familiarity, certainly better to fuse off the second core and market it as a familiar dual core rather than create another line which could confuse/dilute the market. On the other hand, if (and its a big stretchy if) they decide to drop prices on dual cores, a tri core would provide a middle market option. Not that I would agree with that for them, especially if they get good yields on the native quads. In that case, a specific tri core mask would be the only way to go..saving wafer wields, but at the same time increasing production costs. Probably a short term net sum zero gain. However, if, for whatever bizzare reason, AMDs Tricore takes off, I dont think Intel will want to sit around without a response...even if its only lowering quad prices.

Intel has had some very good opportunities to publically rub AMDs nose in the dirt as of late, and they have largely refrained from doing so, and smartly I think. I cant help but see irony in the 'cache thrashing' media tactic ( I dont remember who started it exactly, I think it was AMDZone, not AMD) now that the 2.4GHz Phenom have been pulled for cache locking. I dont think Intel wants to set themselves up for a pie in the face like that, and with the benchmarks coming out now, they really dont have to.