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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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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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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
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.
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.
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.
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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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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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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