AMD has quietly kicked off shipments of its triple-core Phenom processors, according to a news posting by PC World. Although we haven’t heard a peep from AMD’s press staff about the event just yet, PC World quotes anonymous AMD officials as saying their company is nonetheless shipping triple-core CPUs in volume to PC makers right now.
Reports we spotted on rumor sites last month pointed to Dell and HP as likely first adopters for AMD’s new silicon, and PC World’s article suggests that will indeed be the case. HP, for one, already sells a triple-core Phenom machine on its Bulgarian site. The PC looks unglamorously advertised as a business offering, and its specifications list mentions an “AMD Phenom™ Triple Core 8600B” CPU clocked at 2.3GHz with 1.5MB of L2 cache (512KB per core). That Phenom is sharing the ride with an AMD 780V-based motherboard, 2GB of DDR2-800 RAM, and a 160GB hard drive. As for Dell, the world’s number-two also intends to feature triple-core Phenoms in its OptiPlex 740 systems, according to a brochure (PDF) on its website.
AMD isn’t offering its new chips only to the two biggest players in the market, though. The chipmaker’s triple-core offerings are also listed in Matrix xXx Plus and Matrix xXx Pro systems from Mesh Computers, a smaller British PC vendor. The first system has a Phenom 8400 clocked at 2.1GHz, while the latter has the same 2.3GHz CPU as the aforementioned HP desktop. Both chips feature 2MB of L3 cache.
Tricore AMDs will be their competition to Intel’s Core2Duo. The eventual “Semperon” version of the Phenom will be dual core.
Each additional cpu core is a pretty big deal. We all agree a windows system benefits from the 2nd core. Many will agree that quads are “overkill”.
The triple core for many users will work out to be “just right”.
Kinda like the three bears and their porridge.
Toms showed that dual core is still the sweet spot. Triple core has some advantages, but quad is more or less overkill showing very little improvement over triple core in most cases.
§[< http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/02/28/a_first_look_at_amd_triple_core_phenom/<]§
I just read that article. They should have included a regular dual core at the same clock speed.
Yay, another core that can sit around and do nothing (as if this task wasn’t already mostly the case with dual core chips) Such progress!
With what you implied, we really do not need progress.
I in fact need 10 cores to get my simulation done. My current run will take one months on five cores.
Your application is a big time exception.
That second core is busy creating Creamy Smoothness™.
TR is the eighth hit on a google search for “Creamy Smoothness”.
§[< http://www.google.com/search?q=Creamy+Smoothness<]§ Who's number one? Apparently it's a patent application for ... q[
I think a second core is good for all, but any more than that is just wasted until software catches up. But perhaps the best way to get software makers to catch up is to send the signal loud and clear that multithreading is the future.
I expect that performance with three cores will be closer to quad-core performance than it is to dual-core performance in all cases. Thus, the third core is incrementally more useful than the fourth core is.
I’d much much much rather AMD had a competitive dual core (in terms of the holy trinity: IPC, clockspeed, and power consumption).
Yeah, AMD thought about putting out a dual core chip with higher clockspeed and lower power consumption, but then they decided that they would keep it under wraps, to keep from making Intel’s chips look bad. </sarcasm>
Honestly, if they *[
Uh, not sure what you are getting at. I’m just saying I wish AMD’s dual cores were more competitive. Another way of saying it it is that I wish they hadn’t screwed up K10 so badly – I wish K10 had been a focus on better dual core performance and a solution for bunging two of them together MCM style (just like Intel’s quads).
That’s a little hard as they are currently down in all 3 areas… :*
Huh??
I thought these things were AMD’s April Fool’s Day joke for 2007…
Only 2.3ghz? I wonder how these overclock
My guess is 2.5GHZ MAX ..
And these are the bugged B2 chips. No thanks.
Like you will ever encounter the actual erratum.
The only problem might be motherboards where you can’t turn the corresponding fix off.
The bug should be far less likely to appear with 3 cores. It might not appear at all. Has there been any confirmation by anyone, even AMD using simulations, that the bug has ever been encountered on tricore chips?
And this was a surprise? If AMD could clock phenom higher at this instance wouldn’t you think that those highest clock models be in top line quad core phenoms already?