Does anyone really buy these X3 chips? Most AMD people seem to get Athlon BE or quads it seems. Not intended to be flamebait btw just wondering I don't really hear much about these.

I agree, I never hear much about the X3 cpu's. They could be decent, but who knows. What does sadden me tho is Deneb was supposed to be H2 2008 but now it looks like 2009. Competition is a good thing.

Well, a Black edition Triple Core may be fun to play with at a good price point. I know I personally wasn't interested at all until I heard about this Black Edition. There is talk that because one core is disabled on these triple cores. that overclocking can be much better... hmmm.

That might be good for a budget gaming system. Really though AMD needs to come out with some faster X4s sooner as they aren't on the Roadmap till December.

I have seen some reviews that show the X3 8750 OC to 3Ghz. It would probably be a good chip for anyone on a tight budget. Plus remember a lot of people do not OC and are not worried about gaming. The cheapest X3 is only 100 bucks. The BE edition is 115 bucks. I would not mind picking one up to play around with but my wife would probably shoot me.

Like it was noted previously, the Athlon64 X2 is still in the roadmap, making a big shade to the Phenom X3s. If AMD stops making Athlon64 X2's, then these Phenoms might see the light, otherwise, i'd say they'll be still in the shade. I don't know if 1 extra core is worth the difference. The good thing is that triple core BE. Sounds like fun indeed. Maybe that's the direct replacement for the Athlon64 5000 and 6000 BE's.

Esop!

Draws the same wattage, almost same price and same speed as an x2, why not if you're building new, and really can't do with the extra price of a proper quad? Looks good to me.

Hopefully it will drive overall prices down even more.

AMD's quad cores have dropped down in price a lot.Over at newegg.com I've seen the Phenom X4 9550 for under $140.

Why would a company that has had net losses 7 quarters in a row, a lot of debt and a need for cash to finance future production capacity continue to slash prices? This makes no sense unless they are having trouble moving product. If they are not having issues moving product, why cut prices so much when you are operating at a net loss for so long?

And cutting tri-cores just puts more pressure on AMD then Intel! It picks off potential 'low end' AMD quad sales and puts pricing pressure on dual cores which is still the high volume product. Remember from a cost perspective a tri-core is a quad core piece of Silicon and is the equivalent of a bit more than 2 Athlon X2's from a silicon and production cost perspective. I would rather make 2 Athlon's then 1 tri-core; we are now 18 months into the 65nm ramp so I would assume AMD has figured out 65nm yield by now?

Pricedroppinmadness:
A triple core is a defective quad, the silicon would have been spent anyway, they make money on what would otherwise be lost on trashed/recycled cpus.

x3's are just X4's with a bum core. So it's selling them as tri core vs throwing away the silicon.

Triple Cripple is loose! Run for the hills!

Kuka's point is a good one.

AMD needs to bin the X2 gigher end parts like the 6400+ etc.

Then more will show interest in the Phenom.

Sounds good ... but when you need sales of "anything" then this falls down as an aarguement.

Plus the 90nm parts (the high end X2's and old Opti's) are cheaper to make thant the Phenoms.

The 65nm X2's also offer a wider powere envelope - albeit the only (Brisbane) mask they made was with the 512K (half the cache of the high end 90nm X2's) crippled cache.

Some idiot should have made a full shrink of the 90nm (1Mb + 1Mb) mask and then they could have shut down the 90nm process alltogether.

Idiots.

Is this the CPU with one working core disabled or three defective cores enabled?

...the latter.

Good one Randomizer! LOL
What AMD should have done was disable not only the bad core but disable the third core and make a very low powered X2 out of it instead of pushing all these triple core rejects.

That would be one huge dual core.

"A triple core is a defective quad, the silicon would have been spent anyway, they make money on what would otherwise be lost on trashed/recycled cpus."

And you of course would be wrong with this overly simplistic statement. Like AMD, no business sense as you need to look at total ROI, and not a "grunt, grunt...it would have been thrown away anyway" analysis.

First - the tri-core segment pushes down the upper end dual core prices which are sold IN FAR MORE VOLUME than tricores (at LEAST a 10:1 ratio, if not more) If you can make $5-10 more for 10X the volume...you do the math!

Second - your assumption baked in (that you don't realize) is that AMD would have lost the sale if there was no tri-core bin. This is obviously not the case as with no tri-core you would have a mix of people moving up to quad core or down to dual core, and of course some may move to Intel. So to dumb this down you may end up throwing away a chip that costs $60 (or whatever a quad core costs to make), but replace that sale with a higher margin part sale. This may blow your mind but it's possible the margin on a quad sale may actually be better when comparing it to throwing a tricore away (it will at least offset the "throwing a tricore away" cost impact)

Third - there are costs to FINISHING, SELLING, BINNING, STOCKING, MAINTAINING INVENTORY, LOGISTICS, etc of maintaining the extra bins for the tri-core. This is not huge, but not "free". So this view of it essentially being found money or effectively a free sale, is wrong.

FINALLY - the assumption nearly everyone makes is that a tri-core is just a quad core with a non-functional core. Is it possible, some of these are working quad core that couldn't meet the TDP bin? Is it possible that AMD is 'locking' good quad cores to meet tri-core demand? people are ASSUMING these are chips that 'would have been thrown out anway' but has anyone actually confirmed this is the case for ALL tri-cores? I have seen no official statement from AMD that these are only non-working quads - while some (or even most) of them may be, ever think they all might not be?

In short, people should look at a bigger picture of overall impact and not 'tricore or throw away' as if that sale occurs in a vacuum and has no other impact on AMD sales or other part prices.

Or perhaps folks' 3rd garde logic on this is correct....

Of course they're not all "defective", AMD couldn't have an entire product lineup purely based on faulty chips. Well, we hope their yields aren't that bad anyway.

they ought to make Phenom X2 rather than X3 which will make a very good combo with a 780G chipset and they will give good price and performance ratio and will definetely will be good for HTPC users. they should also ramp up the speed of X4 if they want to give competition to Intel in clock to clock performance.

I think That AMD hasnt cut off production of the dual core chips yet for the main fact that they are the most bought chips, not mention that there are more main boards that are "ready to use" the dual cores. While many main boards still require a bios update before ackwoledgeing a quad core athy , much less the odd 3 cores.
On another note few single applications currently require and or make use of 3 core/4 core processors. These processors have really only found full function under work station enviroments , such as systems built for auto Desk applications , like Autocad and 3ds Max. asied from architects, game developers , these processors don';t really get used to thier fullest extent much less taxed. I can run MS office word , adope photoshop CS 3,Illustrator cs3, and run a movie at the same time and my x2 only reaches 40% usage. It took all that , Plus 3ds max , and adobe flash professional to get my x2 processor past 60% usage.
Point being, 3 core processors will always be nothing more than a niche product until two things happens, 1. amd stops sales of x2's (which would really hurt them in the short run) , and 2. we get aplications that start demanding more processor power (less likely to happen than number 1 for various reasons most important being , that no software/game designer wants to shut out most of thier market which is still on single or dual core processors).

Don't get me wrong, i like amd , my last 4 computers were amd rigs , it's just this company lately seems to be runing it's self in circles ever since intel took back the high end of the market. what AMD needs now is produce a better processor, it's doesn't have nessicarily take the "top" it just needs to close the gap more.

P.S. My next system will liekly be AMD still only thing i can say for amd is at least they stomp intel when it comes to the bang for bucks

oh and inregards to teh "is it a quad witha disabled core" argument , i think it would be intersting tio see if some one could manage to turn on the "4th" core, it these chips really ahve a disabled 4th core , there must be some way for some one to modify it so that the core is enabled ??? or at least you think it would be possible ??? any oen else care to speculate on this ?

I'm pretty sure it isn't a matter of just "turning them off".

I'm using the 2.1GHz Tri-core in my HTPC, runs fairly cool and gives me another core to split the encoding/decoding load across.

Its a actually a nice trade off between the cool dual cores and hotter quads. Running it passively on a Sythe Mini Ninja at around 34C.

Just asking. Is it a great idea to make propearty dual core based on Phenom something with 1 mb L3 cache an greater clock speed. Because the software is more optimised for dual core and greater clock speed would have greater impact on performance. Opinions?

Well, when your yields are at an abysmal 30-40%, you gotta do something to scrape some bucks together.

It doesnt work that way Reynod. It appears once again that YOU'RE the idiot here. The main killer isnt the newer design, it's the crappy SOI process they're using.

Nobody ever questions whether Intel "disables" bad cache block on some C2D chips and sell them as E2xx0, E4x00, E5x00 and E7x00 or fab them with different process. The failure rate of Phenoms doesn't seem to be high, so AMD can make more x3 instead of x2. Nothing is wrong with tri-cores, and people do buy them. The only complain I have to AMD is that they should have release 8750 BE in the first place.

That's actually pretty bad idea. I've done some test with 9850 and it only out-take E4300 at 1.8GHz when data size is twice as large as E4300's L2. Granted that CnQ is on in those test, but at 1.8GHz same thing happens. Agena core is superior to K8, but still about 20% behind C2D clock for clock. Most of the deficiency can be attribute to failure to utilize enough CPU clocks in single threaded process. Phenom only shines when you can utilize at least 2 cores. In that case, C2D is no match to Phenom x3 or x4 clock for clock. Those SuperPi 1M test is an indication of the raw power of a CPU, and current AMD offerings are just not as good as Intel ones. However, if your code and data size is way larger than L2 cache, AMD starts to have an edge. But just look at the size of some Intel CPU's L2. They need to improve L3 size, IMC and also IPC in order to catch up Intel. From Phenom's architecture, cache area is actually relative small compare to Intel C2D. There is no point cutting L3 when most failure occurs on cores.

intel's e5200 is a serious threat to what AMD has going on...the main reason why my rigs are AMD is because I can make a dirt cheap rig that provides more than enough performance for me...now that intel has introduced the e5200 ($90 45nm, 2.5ghz dual core...that overclocks well as well...jesus...), AMD really needs to do something...