New AMD chips coming out next week

Anyone have an opinion on the new OEM AMD Phenom II X4 970 BE?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20100811101304_AMD_Readies_Bunch_of_New_Processors_to_Refresh_Back_to_School_Lineup.html

from what I'm reading, it's supposed to be an X6 with 2 cores turned off, and its due to hit Sept 21 with aproce point around $200-ish

My questions: would this be a good multi-purpose chip: unlock 6 cores for heavy multithreading like Photoshop, DivX encoding, or 3D Rendering on Maya or 3D Studio, then lock the extra cores, leaving 4 cores at 3.5 ghz (or faster, it is a Black Edition?) for faster gaming performance. 6 cored would probably need to be underclocked for heat purposes.

it sounds like it should work out as a good multi-purpose build, or is is just too good to be true?

 
Solution
i admire AMD for doing this..

it stops waste and makes money on something which would normally be wasted....



I have bought some x3 athlons and they seem to be ok. but in my mind its a faulty processor which could long term be troublesome,, something as a system builder i can not afford....


but to me 2 cores disabled means that a 3rd of the processor is faulty... think about it or am i missing the point.


hb

loneninja

Distinguished
Thing is, they are going to be OEM only and difficult to obtain in the retail market because of it. There will also be a 970BE composed of Deneb cores too, due to this I would expect extremely few OEM 970BE to unlock functional cores.

I think it was toms that had an article earlier this year about the 960T, if I remember right there was only about a 33% chance to unlock cores, and the sample toms had could only hit 3.6Ghz with the extra cores unlocked.
 

sarwar_r87

Distinguished
Mar 28, 2008
837
0
19,060
Ha desperate AMD now will resolve to lame tactic to sell faulty X6.

whats so desperate about it?

if anything, they are being smart. instead of through it in the dustbin, they are harvesting it. and giving the option to uses to get a x6 from a x4....a lot of people are actually waiting for it
 


If AMD holds to what I think they said, they could probably cut the power traces to the 2 locked cores so that they would be 100% locked, no possibility of unlocking them as you can now on the X2s or X3s (which I believe are only "locked" in the firmware).
 

Hellboy

Distinguished
Jun 1, 2007
1,842
0
19,810
i admire AMD for doing this..

it stops waste and makes money on something which would normally be wasted....



I have bought some x3 athlons and they seem to be ok. but in my mind its a faulty processor which could long term be troublesome,, something as a system builder i can not afford....


but to me 2 cores disabled means that a 3rd of the processor is faulty... think about it or am i missing the point.


hb
 
Solution

Hellboy

Distinguished
Jun 1, 2007
1,842
0
19,810



yo girl, hows yo doin

and how yo doin in da exam time..


all going good i hope... your summers gonna start soon so got something to look forward to. Australia the only place where they barbeque the turkey :)
 

amdfangirl

Expert
Ambassador


Heh, I'm going to France Thursday...

Stupid job...
 


I don't think Intel or AMD has ever waster a chip unless it was a single core that had only half the core.

But its what they have to do. I do wonder though if SOI is part of the reason. Intel did say that the reason they bypassed SOI was due to the bad yields at a smaller process. If its true I would imagine the 32nm yields will be pretty low to start meaning AMD will have more X2/X3 and X4s than X6 CPUs.
 

Hellboy

Distinguished
Jun 1, 2007
1,842
0
19,810



I do think Intels manufacturing process is a lot better than global foundaries..

The do have more money to make the better plants, therefore the lower number of failures.


its just amds way of making good out of faulty goods.. next we will have a 5 core :)