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."

You know what would be even better?

[LaskoVortex]

Enable that other core!

Re:You know what would be even better?

[LaskoVortex]

Ah, yes. This makes great sense, but the announcement should have read "one of the cores defective", which would be more correct. The word disabled suggests purposeful disabling, which is misleading--but perhaps the announcement was a victim of marketing language chicanery.

Re:There's no need to wait for any reviews

[idiotwithastick]

For most things, no 3 cores isn't really going to be much benefit at this point. While there are now multithreaded games out there that make use of 2 cores pretty well, they don't really scale past that at this point.

But now you can play games and encode a dvd at the same time. It's still useful. And at some point or another there will be games that support use of multiple processors, just like there are games now that support physics processors (though few) even though most people don't have one.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, yes. This makes great sense, but the announcement should have read "one of the cores defective", which would be more correct. The word disabled suggests purposeful disabling, which is misleading--but perhaps the announcement was a victim of marketing language chicanery.

So... They disable the defective one. How is this misleading? Other companies do it too -- HDD makers sell bigger HDDs as smaller ones when they fail QA testing, for example.

Seriously, if the price difference is enough to make buying one of these "tricores" worth it, and more importantly, if these Dells allow me to throw in a "real" Phenom aftermarket (or even ship with the option to buy a true quad-core Phenom...) well, more power to them.

Not only that, AMD seriously wins in this -- they sell these (likely Dell Precision Workstations and/or Dell XPSes) with their "tri" core CPUs, as well as -- I would wager -- their Quad Core CPUs as an upgrade, and they'll start to finally make some inroads with them. So far the impression I've gotten is that both Intel and AMD's quad core offerings have been kinda DOA with consumers (as opposed to the enterprise). But then again, I typically work with office workstations (Optiplex, PWS, etc).

Ob-Full Disclosure: I work for Dell as a Prosupport Tech Support Agent.

Re:There's no need to wait for any reviews

[compro01]

Q: If you are running 3 apps at the same time will they each be assigned to their own core?

A: maybe. that depends on how good the operating system is about managing multiple processors and multiple threads.

What's "defective" about them?

[Joce640k]

You're sold a three core chip, it has three working cores.

Which part of that is "defective", misleading, or unfit for purpose?

How many dual core chips are really four core chips with two failed cores? Do you know? Face it, it's just the number three which bugs you, and that's pretty childish...

Re:so.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that a cheap attempt at humor?

Or maybe you don't understand manufacturing.
Not a shyster; no suckers.
(It would be interesting to pit an AMD Triple-core against Intel's Quad-core.)

Computer chips have billions of transistors, capacitors, resistors, and interconnects. All of them have to work to make the chip work.

Even in the says of tubes (valves), the manufacturers tested their product, then set aside the best to sell at a premium.

Intel used this technique on their 486SX processors. When the FPU on a 486DX tested defective, they could disable it and sell it as a 486SX. They probably still use the technique with multi-core processors. It would be stupid and wasteful not to.

Hard drives hold billions, even trillions of bits. All have to work. Drive makers have always mapped out defective sectors. Now they do it transparently. Flash disks too.

MacDonald's advertises "Billions Served." Imagine if they could say, "Billions served without a mistake."
When is the last time you were able to produce millions of items without a defect?

Re:There's no need to wait for any reviews

[Antique Geekmeister]

I expect these to be popular for virtualization systems as well, where a spare CPU for the spare OS can do wonders for your performance, and a vastly cheaper set of triple cores can easily satisfy the needs of a few very expensive quad-cores, with an option for upgrades as needed.

Re:No

[dbIII]

If you can't do a bare metal reinstall without reading a 42 digit number over the phone to somebody in India their licencing confusion is barely relevant in a serious computing environment. Limits of 2GB and 2 processors show that the world passed them by long ago, let alone birrare connection limits defined by licences instead of the capabilities of the hardware that should render them irrelevant for fileservers once you get a company big enough to have more than five computers.

You have an 8 processor machine running Vista? I know quad core chips are cheap but if you are going to run MS stuff why use the hobby software instead of at least the small business software? You would have a better file server for the MS Windows environment by even putting a knoppix CDROM in and turning on samba - the slow read speed of any applications from the CD would still vastly outperform Vista and access to hard drives would be much faster.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't think sampling can necessarily tell whether a given batch will have a lot of chips with one defective core. I think they have to go farther with testing. It sounds like the kind of defect that's dependent on like a microscopic speck of dust to fall onto the silicon, but in a good enough place such that you can just map out an entire CPU core.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[Hal_Porter]

You could probably test the chips on the wafer before you chop it up. I can imagine supply power to the wafer and looping JTAG [wikipedia.org] test lines through all the chips. Then some self test would run in parallel on all chips and you'd know which chips were bad, which had one bad core and so on. Actually just testing the cache would be a good idea. Since most of the die area is cache, most of the dust-spec style defects should be found there.

Of course a few chips might fail in other ways and you'd catch them after packaging, but that should be rare - most of the defects should be caught before you chop up the wafer and package the chips.

I am not an IC engineer, but it seems plausible you could do this.

Re:You know what would be even better?

[billcopc]

Yes and no.

If the cores aren't actually defective, then yes, AMD will make it relatively easy to unlock because that's what they were once famous for, with the Athlon XP.

If the cores are crap, then most likely they will lock them down securely to avoid bad PR. Enthusiasts like you and I understand that there are no guarantees once you start tweaking, but we're not the problem. The problem is shady vendors that unlock/overclock to defraud the client.

Example: I just finished building a cheap machine for my mother-in-law, using an Intel Core Duo E2160 - 1.8ghz stock, but even on a low-end board I managed to hit 3.0 ghz with ease. There are plenty of half-bred sons of bitches who would gladly charge an extra $250 for that system and claim it uses the top-end E6850 processor. This sort of thing is why multiplier locking was implemented in the first place. Back in the 80s and 90s this type of fraud was the norm rather than the exception.

Unlocked or not, I'm not buying a Phenom anytime soon and neither should you. They're weak compared to Intel's 2-year-old Conroe architecture, and by consequence that makes them overpriced. Worse still is the lack of quality motherboards for this young dumb processor. One can only hope they will improve over time, but I won't hold my breath. In my book, everything that came after the NForce4 Ultra has been absolute garbage.