Dell Set to Introduce AMD's Triple-core Phenom CPU

An anonymous reader writes "AMD is set to launch what is considered its most important product against Intel's Core 2 Duo processors next week. TG Daily reports that the triple-core Phenoms — quad-core CPUs with one disabled core — will be launching on February 19. Oddly enough, the first company expected to announce systems with triple-core Phenoms will be Dell. Yes, that is the same company that was rumored to be dropping AMD just a few weeks ago. Now we are waiting for the hardware review sites to tell us whether three cores are actually better than two in real world applications and not just in marketing."

Comments

Yield, effectiveness

[Sparr0]

Making 3-core machines out of 4-core CPUs will do wonders for their yield. So many chips get trashed because of single tiny failures, this will allow them to keep any chip with any number of failures as long as they are limited to just one of the cores. The same sort of benefit Intel saw by using Pentiums with bad cache segments to make Celerons, or nVidia saw when disabling (supposedly) bad pipelines to turn 16-pipe GPUs into cheaper 12-pipe versions.

I am sure some units will make it through the process with a functional-enough fourth core to be useful to "overclockers", but I think the majority will have actual problems. That is, unless there is no 4-working-core version of this processor for the known-working ones to be sold as?

One concern... How do they keep thermal load even if 1/4 of the die is not running?

Re:You know what would be even better?

[Azh Nazg]

It allows them to sell chips with one of the cores broken, thereby getting higher yields from their production lines.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[Wesley Felter]

In multicore systems each core can only talk to two other cores.
With a quad core system, each core cant directly talk to the core diagonal to it which slows things down. That's not correct. In the Phenom, all four cores are connected to the crossbar and can communicate equally.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[edwdig]

If the demand for triple core processors is higher than the supply of quad core processors with one defective core, then AMD could disable a working core on the quad core chips to ensure supply.

Happens all the time in graphics cards. The main difference between different model numbers in the same line is the number of pipelines on the GPU. Top end cards have them all enabled, lower models progressively less. Often the lower end cards will have working pipelines disabled.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[thefear]

But very few programs can handle 3 cores. That's because for programmers, tasks and data and everything really just doesn't divide very well by uneven numbers like 3. So most programs will use 2 of the 3 cores. I have a feeling that you don't understand how cpu scheduling works.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[GreatBunzinni]

You've just demonstrated that you don't have a clue about how an application is ran, let alone how an operating system manages the running processes. For starters, you keep on blabbering about "programs handling cores". That does not have any basis on reality, as the only "program" that can be stated that handles "cores" is the operating system. That's all. The remaining programs that the operating system executes may spawn processes and may be multi-threaded but they do not nor they can handle "cores". At all.

Moreover, even if a certain program, running on a 4-core system, generates 4 processes or threads, you still cannot claim that that particular program "handles 4 cores". It is up to the operating system to manage the system's resources, including where and how a process is ran. It might even run all the 4 processes or threads in the same core.

Another silly thing that you imply which is clearly wrong is that a user can only take advantage of the multiple cores in a system if that user happens to run applications which spawn as many processes or threads as the number of cores. That is just plain wrong. The operating system manages the execution of all the system's processes and threads, which means that it distributes the execution of those processes and threads through all the available processing cores. So, if you run 4 separate applications (single-process/threaded) on a decent operating system running on a 4 processing core system then the operating system may end up executing those 4 separate applications in the 4 separate processing cores. As any desktop computer is running at any given time more than 20 different processes (single or multi-threaded) then the advantage of having more processing cores on your system is rather obvious.

But hey, don't let logic and concrete knowledge on the issue get in the way of your judgement.