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AMD's Triple-Core Phenom X3 Processor Launched
MojoKid writes "AMD officially launched their triple-core processor offering today with the
introduction of the Phenom X3 8750. When AMD first announced plans to introduce tri-core processors
late last year, reaction to the news was mixed. Some felt that AMD was simply planning to pass off partially functional Phenom
X4 quad-core processors as triple-core products, making lemonade from lemons if you will. Others thought it was a good way for AMD to increase bottom line profits, getting more usable die from a wafer and mitigating yield loss. This is an age-old strategy in the semiconductor space and after all, the graphics guys have been selling GPUs with non-functional units for years. This full
performance review and
evaluation of the new AMD Phenom X3 8750 Tri-Core processor shows the CPU
scales well in a number of standard application benchmarks, in addition to
dropping in at a relatively competitive price point."
3 cores sounds "wrong" (it should be apower of 2, right?), but with 3 cores, you can connect each core to every other one on an internal bus much more easily than with 4 cores, since you need fewer busses, and they do not need to cross.
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For what it's worth, TR reached very different conclusions after more extensive testing against more relevant competition--Intel's 45nm chips, like the Core 2 Duo E7200, E8400, and Q9300.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606
The idea of reviving quad cores with 1 bad core is nice, but AMD is also playing a dangerous game. It is only in AMD's interest to sell triple core CPUs when the only alternative would be to throw the (large and expensive) die out since it can't work as a quad core. However, if these things became too popular AMD would be faced with the situation of either starving the market, or taking quad cores that actually DO work and intentionally blowing the fuses to make them triple cores.
I think this might explain the pretty lackluster clockspeeds. Phenom has never clocked well, but when you can buy a 2.5Ghz quad core for not much more than the top of the line 2.4Ghz triple core, it's pretty clear AMD wants to unload these things, but not to make any big waves about it. If anything the triple cores ought to clock much higher and have substantially better power usage... but that is not the case.
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Looks like AMD's marketing and sales dept isn't being very smart here, pricing them the way they are. X3 chips are $20 cheaper than X4, and $5 cheaper than 2.2 GHz X4s. And with those benchmarks they are definitely not competitive against intel's 2-core and 4-core offerings. Come on guys! If you don't let go of some of the margins and price them aggressively against Intel you're going to die.
...that makes AMD more competitive and sell more processors is a good thing in my book.
After all, healthy competition keeps them honest, eh?
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Yes, but not much:
However, due to the lack of support of HyperTransport 3.0 and separated power planes in Socket AM2 motherboards, AM2+ chips will be limited to the specifications of Socket AM2 (HyperTransport 2.0 at the speed of 1 GHz, one power plane for both Cores and IMC).
Source: Wikipedia
A couple more reviews that aren't as, um, positive:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=550&pid=2
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14606
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/23/amd_phenom_x3_8750/1
All of Intel's quad-core processors are actually a pair of dual core dies on one chip. So if one core is bad, they make a single core CPU out of it maybe, or if they do just toss it, they are losing much less wasted silicon.
Because it makes the algorithms for splitting up work simpler? I remember reading a review where they took a dual processor motherboard, put a dual core in one socket and a single core in the other. Some applications crashed in multithreading mode due to the non power of two number of cores.
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Is it just me, or looking at those benchmarks was the clear response to just buy intel since it wins in virtually every category anyway. Or were the intel chips listed not directly comparable? I'm still running my X2-4600+ and am thrilled with the performance... but if I were in the market, those particular charts would all be leading me to the Intel processors.
That wasn't due to the applications. It was due to the system not being designed to work that way... the single-core CPU wasn't made to be able to talk to the other CPU's. The 3-core AMD CPU works perfectly well under any load.
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I agree, if they were smart they would have called it the "Trinity" chip, stuck a cross logo on the box, and sold it to the same Christian Fundamentalists who read the Lost Behind novels.
A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
Stolen from the techreport article you posted:
'I can't help but think this all must have looked different on AMD's roadmap when it was first being put together. I doubt they expected that the fastest Phenom would only run at 2.4GHz and, in doing so, would only just match the Core 2 Quad Q6600--an older product on the way out, replaced by the Core 2 Quad Q9300. That's the reality, though, and it's constrained AMD's pricing so much that the top Phenom quad core is $235. The compression through the rest of the lineup makes the triple-core value proposition suspect. Give up a core to get 200MHz more at $195? Not likely when the Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition, at 2.5GHz with an unlocked multiplier, is 40 bucks more. The logic of the pricing scheme may be internally consistent, but the stakes are too low. I'd go with the X4 9850 ten times out of ten. If, that is, I were somehow bound and determined to choose an AMD processor over one of Intel's current offerings.'
That sums it up pretty well.
First of all, that AMD can only play in the low end of the market, and second that who is going to give up a core to save $40?
This seems like an exercise in futility.
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Somewhere in my office, I have a vintage system based on an old 486SX, with the disabled/broken math coprocessor. Who here remembers those things? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
I also have a couple laptops with the fully functional coprocessors. They are early tablet PCs with b/w pen-sensitive screens, and actually can do handwriting recognition with a 486DX running at a screaming 25 mhz. I might go downstairs and fire one up just for the nostalgia of it. Last I checked, they still worked.
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Who cares? Even if the chip was a failed quad core with one of the cores disabled, why is it bad for AMD to sell them as triple cores? Would you prefer they just melt the silicon back down, wasting time, money, and most importantly, energy? I certainly don't.
It would sound to me like it would run a heck of a lot colder than with 4. I mean it's designed to run at a decent temp with 4 cores running so with 3, it'll be really cold! If you underclock a processor to 75% it barely puts off any heat. Of course the 3 cores will still be maxing so it's different but it should be way cooler anyway. But of course that's a bigger problem than they think. I dunno how they're actually arranged but if 3 corners are hot and one not, plus the fact that it was a bad processor in the first place, these things are gonna fail so fast people are gonna be pissed! You don't heat a damaged straight from the factory chip unevenly!
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PS3 uses the CELL processor built with 8 cores and one is disabled, leaving you with 7 cores-one for the OS and 6 for games/apps. And it will boot and run a linux image, yellowdog, which is a ported centos. So there ya go, you can buy one if you want one. There's more exact specs at the links, that is a basic and probably sort of flawed summary.
I was expecting 2, 4, 8, etc. ... not 3 ?!?
Don't look at it from a marketing perspective, look at it from a manufacturing perspective. It is not a 3, it is a 4 - 1. A quad core with one broken core.
To AMD fanboi's who are reading, take a breath and do not interpret the above as an attack on AMD. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, why waste the three good cores and all the energy, time, and resources that went into producing them. Disable the failed core and sell the part as a trio at a discount relative to the quad.
I'm having flashbacks to the original Pentium, where a production line manufactured 120 MHz CPUs but when packaged the CPUs could be 75, 90, or 120 MHz. Some 75s were CPUs that failed at 120 and 90 but passed at 75, but many were good 120s that shipped as 75s because all the 120 orders were filled and 75 orders were pending. Hence the legendary overclocking of the 75. I wonder if dual cores will someday follow a similar pattern. The production line manufactures quads but they are packaged as quads or duos depending on testing and orders to be filled.
The Cell in PS3s has 8 SPEs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cell_Broadband_Engine_Processor.jpg
A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
That would be manufacturing not engineering, and no one gets 100% yields out of manufacturing. Not even God, look at the defect rate in his creation, human beings.
They're the 89.7597399923's to me. I still have an original Pentium P54C.
I agree, if they were smart they would have called it the "Trinity" chip, stuck a cross logo on the box, and sold it to the same Christian Fundamentalists who read the Lost Behind novels. A failed core goes from being a sign of bad engineering, to a sign from God.
Which god, Jehovah (old testament) or Neo (The Matrix)? Matrix fanbois would probably be a more lucrative market. Use the name Trinity but make the CPU packaging a glossy black instead of matte black.
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Anything that makes AMD more competitive and sell more processors is a good thing in my book. After all, healthy competition keeps them honest, eh?
And it is a greener strategy, less waste of resources and energy, so there are public relations and marketing benefits as well.
No, the quoted text from TechReport doesn't say anything about how well the CPU works. It suggests that some applications were coded with performance hacks for two- or four-core systems and didn't deal too well with having three.
If the CPU executed faulty instructions, caused system crashes or failed to divide 4195835.0 by 3145727.0 properly then you could say that the CPU was not "working perfectly well". If causing Windows Vista to "have trouble" was a sign of a CPU not working then you would have much bigger problems than just this.
AMD systems are already radically different from how PCs used to be constructed ten years ago. Memory controller integration (NUMA in a multi-socket configuration) and a non-shared front-side bus come to mind, as does the point-to-point bus used between the processor and the south bridge (HyperTransport).
Contrast with Intel's "solution" which involves two sets or north and south bridges. Hardly elegant, and fails to expose the NUMA properties that the north bridges mitigate between one another.
Once AMD gets the clockspeed bit tuned in, I expect Phenoms to hit the high-performance market like a bar of soap in a sock. HPC likes memory bandwidth, but they like low memory latency even more and that's where AMD has Intel by the goolies. (ever wonder why even Athlon X2s hold their own in game benchmarks? doesn't matter how many gigahertz there are in the chip, games have datasets far larger than that 6-meg L2 cache.)
Intel doesn't fabricate quad core processors - they only make single and dual core chips. They may well be selling bad dual cores as single core processors (or not), but their chips are tested well before two dual cores get glued together into a quad core so they don't have the same situation that makes triple-core make sense for AMD.
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not a great comparison I felt. they used DDR2 memory on the AMD and DDR3 on the intel. DDR3 ram is so much more costly, that I'd think anyone considering AMD would be comparing against a DDR2 based intel motherboard.
The beauty of it (from an engineering point of view) is that every core has been designed with 3 HT links. One goes to the memory, and two connect to other cores. So really, in a four-core system, there is an additional latency because information needs two hops to reach all of the cores. Three cores is the max AMD can do while still keeping latency at its lowest.
AMD's cores (the compute engines inside a single chip package) are NOT connected by HT links. HT links are used for communication with devices OUTSIDE of the chip package, and run at a clockspeed much less than that of the core clock.
AMD's cores are connected by a full speed crossbar switch, much, MUCH faster than HT. Most people really don't get that HT is chip-to-chip or chip-to-chipset, and that AMD has a fullspeed crossbar in the die. To say it one more time: AMD's cores within the same chip are connected at full CPU speed, and every core is exactly two hops to another: core-to-switch-to-core.
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To add further: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/7
This is from image processing benchmarks and you can see the X3 is barely beating the X2s in most cases.
Here is for video encoding: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/8
Again the X3 is near the bottom and in many cases being outperformed by X2s.
I'm not sure where you're getting view about the X3s outperforming the Intel chips, but outside of a few isolated cases they are near the bottom of almost every benchmark. And in a number of cases losing to a not so new X2 models.
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i believe instead they disable a not-quite-functional core from their quad-processor reject bin.
Ah, good old intel trick.
Back in the day, the 486 had a built in FPU (maths co-processor) which was expensive. The 486 could execute integer instructions about twice as fast at the same clock speed as the 386 (which didn't have a maths co-processor built in).
So, to compete with Apple, Atari (Falcon) and Acorn (Archimedes), intel launched the 486SX, which was a 486 with the broken maths co-processor disabled.
Now, there was a 386SX. The 386 was 32-bit internally and externally. The 386SX (1988?) was hobbled to have a 16-bit internal data bus and 24-bit address bus externally much like the Motorola 68000 from about 1981 (in Macs, Ataris, Amigas etc.) No maths on board.
So this is just business. "Nothing to see here. Move along," as it were.
Oh, and I can still get a proper quad-core AMD cheaper than intel's Frankenstein offering of two dual cores sewn together, so who cares?
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