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AMD's Triple-Core Phenom X3 Processor Launched
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:23 AM
from the hey-your-core-is-missing dept.
from the hey-your-core-is-missing dept.
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."
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3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only thing I don't see happening is fractional counts - 7.5 cores (7 full, and one "handicapped"). The OS would then have to learn to avoid the "gimpy" cores for CPU hungry processes.
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose it could be worse, you could have some kind of fractional symmetry fetish and only feel normal surrounded by mandelbrot sets and serpenski gaskets.
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:4, Interesting)
So for me "driving" a 3-core computer would feel pretty normal.
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The hypothesis here would be that any reasonable person understands that, at some point, we will achieve the peak of oil production. At that point we'll see declining oil production into the future. Further, it would make sense to achieve peak oil while in a very wasteful and inefficient state. This will ma
Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Funny)
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you can buy one today (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Insightful)
And as the GP states,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.
I'm not exactly sure if this is how the demoted quad-cores will work as well, but I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to reconfigure the fourth HT bridge (on the disabled core) to act as a short-circuit.
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Incorrect. (Score:5, Informative)
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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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For that matter, why would you suspect the rest might be dodgy? They've passed functional testing.
Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Informative)
What's going on is out of 500 million transistors, perhaps ONE of them is defective. Whatever cache/core/etc that one transistor is in, is therefore useless. But in no way does this make the rest of the chip 'dodgy'.
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:4, Funny)
We call this formation the "flux capacitor."
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:5, Informative)
POWER4 - released in 2001, POWER4 is the first commercial multicore system with 2 cores per chip, and 8 cores per socket.
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Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but... (Score:4, Funny)
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AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone already does that. That's one of the reasons that Celerons used to be so popular with the overclocker crowd. When Intel didn't have enough of one kind of Celeron but had too many of another, they would mark down the faster chips or disable some cache on a P3.
Due to yields, if you buy a slow processor there is a good chance that it is capable of running quite a bit faster. When you buy a top of the line processor, that's much less likely.
GPU makers have been known to do the same thing. I remember when you could flash a low end card (one of the GeForce 4s?) to be a more expensive one (more shaders) and you might end up with a working card (wasn't disabled due to errors, just to 'meet quota').
This is normal. If they didn't do this, people would have to buy the faster chips which would cause their price to drop.
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Re:AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular (Score:5, Informative)
That may have happened, but usually when chips are marked down it's because they didn't perform within specs in the higher slot. The fact that they don't show obvious problems in the hands of an overclocker doesn't mean they didn't meet the maker's QC cutoffs.
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Re:AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I would sell them at dual-core prices and get rid of the whole lot pronto.
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Pricing... (Score:5, Informative)
Missed Marketing opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Missed Marketing opportunity (Score:5, Funny)
That's Left Behind. Lost Behind is the less successful spin-off where we discover that everybody who was carried off by the Rapture just got sent to a tropical island filled with Polar Bears.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I find that Christian Fundamentalists have no trouble finding their behinds since they spend a good portion of their
day with theirs heads up in it.
But what I think you were referring to was the Left Behind series of novels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind [wikipedia.org]
Not even God gets a 100% yield (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Jehovah or Neo (Score:4, Funny)
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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Re:Jehovah or Neo (Score:5, Informative)
The speeds were in reality 333.33... and 666.66..., so simple rounding produces 333 and 667. Perhaps they were merely using better mathematics than when they named the 133 and 266.
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Anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, healthy competition keeps them honest, eh?
It's also greener (Score:3, Insightful)
And it is a greener strategy, less waste of resources and energy, so there are public relations and marketing benefits as well.
More reviews that seem more correct (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=550&pid=2 [pcper.com]
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14606 [techreport.com]
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/04/23/amd_phenom_x3_8750/1 [bit-tech.net]
this review seems to summarize it well. (Score:3, Interesting)
'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
Intel (Score:3, Informative)
Why do you care if they are failed quad-cores? (Score:5, Insightful)
less heat? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why doesn't Intel (Score:4, Insightful)
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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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Please someone explain (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:AM2+ vs AM2 (Score:4, Informative)
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Manufacturing perspective: 4 - 1 (Score:3, Insightful)
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 disco
Re:where is the power of two (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:where is the power of two (Score:5, Funny)
They're the 89.7597399923's to me. I still have an original Pentium P54C.
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Re:where is the power of two (Score:5, Funny)
I have been doing logs since I started eating solid food.
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It's log, it's log... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:PC architecture review? (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
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