What We Think

Personally, I think it could be a good thing for both AMD and consumers. AMD gets to salvage some of those damaged and essentially worthless quad-core dies. Consumers like us get to buy them at lower prices. If the price is right, it will be a worthwhile bargain with no real loss to the consumer, and all gain for AMD. A real win-win situation.

Of course, it all depends on how well they perform and how much AMD intends to sell them for. We have no doubt that AMD will price them according to the market conditions at that time. Don't expect them to sell these triple-core processors at bargain prices just because they were made from "crippled' quad-core processors.

Performance-wise, the triple-core Phenom may surprise us. By disabling the slower/non-functioning core, the triple-core Phenoms may be able to clock much higher frequencies than their quad-core brethren. In addition, the triple-core Phenom will still have a full 2MB L3 cache but only share it between 3 cores, instead of 4. These factors would make the triple-core Phenoms potentially compelling processors to consider, if the price is right.

Some may argue that it's not right to be paying for broken stuff, it's really no big deal. After all, AMD is not selling you a broken quad-core processor. They are merely fixing it up for sale as a triple-core processor. In fact, this is a common practice especially in the graphics chip industry where crippled GPUs are resold as cheaper, less powerful models.

Let's see what the others think.

Max87 Says...

This will at least allow AMD to make some money out of the damaged processors that would have to be thrown away otherwise. However, high demand for these triple-core processors could force AMD to cripple fully-functional quad-core processors to turn into triple-core processors. This could not only cut down on their profit but also cause them to lose money. After all, with Intel moving to 45nm soon, AMD will have to bring down the price of their processors to remain competitive. Only time will tell if they will benefit financially from this move.

PsYkHoTiK Says...

I have to say that triple cores are somewhat an oddity. Personally, I believe it is a desperate move on AMD's part. Instead of junking their broken quad-core processors, they release the 'rejects' as fully-fledged, working processors. Obvious concerns are apparent. How good will these 'rejects' be? Are they reliable? Will they overclock well (for us enthusiasts)? Also, will someone figure out how to 'unlock' the disabled core, like what we've seen with some GPUs?

Instead of wasting resources (testing, marketing, packaging, etc), I personally feel AMD should divert more attention to playing 'catch up' with Intel. Now, I am no fan boy but if you still cannot scale as high as they can, that is a much bigger problem than trying to get more models of processors out. AMD must really be experiencing abnormally low yields on their quad-core processors if they must resort to salvaging these crippled dies to make saleable processors... We can speculate on all these interesting facts, but we'll know for sure once it goes retail.

Questions & Comments

If you have a question or comment on this editorial, please feel free to post them here!