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", but...

[serviscope_minor]

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.

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[deander2]

i believe instead they disable a not-quite-functional core from their quad-processor reject bin.

A less rosy assessment

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Pricing...

[heteromonomer]

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.

Re:A less rosy assessment

[Anonymous Coward]

err.. link:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606 [techreport.com]

Re:AM2+ vs AM2

[xSacha]

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

More reviews that seem more correct

[Vigile]

A couple more reviews that aren't as, um, positive:

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]

Re:Why doesn't Intel

[Vigile]

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.

Re:where is the power of two

[Anonymous Coward]

log base 2 of 3 = ~ 1.5849625007211561814537389439482

quick way to do it in calc is ln(3)/ln(2)

Re:A less rosy assessment

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, even a dual core Intel running a lower clock rate is faster than the AMD. LOL, good jorb!

Actually I don't think AMD processors are all that bad. Up until a few months ago I was running an Opteron machine. The problem I have always had with the AMD procs is that you have no good choices in motherboards. You end up with some VIA or nVidia shit (I love my nVidia gfx cards but their mainboard chipsets suck).

I was so happy when Intel finally got their act together and came out with the Core series because then I could finally run a decent motherboard.

Intel

[skiflyer]

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.

Re:AM2+ vs AM2

[soulsteal]

So sayeth Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

AMD confirmed that AM2 processors will work in AM2+ motherboards and AM2+ processors will work on AM2 motherboards. 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). AM2 chips will not benefit from faster HyperTransport and separated power planes on AM2+ motherboards as they do not support them, AM2+ motherboard then fall back to compatibility mode using AM2 specifications.

Re:AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular

[MBCook]

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.

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[frieko]

Then you'll be disappointed to find out you've been buying chips with disabled pieces of cache for years.

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'.

Re:Please someone explain

[PitaBred]

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.

Re:AMD does NOT want 3x cores to be too popular

[Otter]

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.

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.

you can buy one today

[zogger]

PS3 uses the CELL processor [wikipedia.org] 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 [terrasoftsolutions.com], 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.

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[EvilRyry]

Maybe the first one you've heard about, but IBM has been doing multicore CPUs for years. From their website...

POWER4 - released in 2001, POWER4 is the first commercial multicore system with 2 cores per chip, and 8 cores per socket.

Re:where is the power of two

[Uncle Focker]

The Cell in PS3s has 8 SPEs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Cell_Broadband_Engine_Processor.jpg [wikipedia.org]

Re:Please someone explain

[Uncle Focker]

The 3-core AMD CPU works perfectly well under any load.

That's not what TechReport says:

Three cores is weird There, I've said it. You know you were thinking it. We're modern folks, open to many possibilities in life, including this one. But three cores is just plain weird. You will need to know this before making the decision to drop a Phenom X3 into your own computer. Dude. Three. This weirdness manifests itself in several ways. Although many of the applications we use for CPU testing had no trouble recognizing the X3's triple cores and putting them to good use, some did. Several SiSoft Sandra modules lost bladder control when asked to quantify the performance of a tri-core processor and simply refused to run. Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder pegged the X3 at 67% utilization and would go no further; two cores were all it would use. Even the 32-bit versions of Windows Vista apparently have trouble recognizing odd numbers of CPU cores. Already, updates are becoming available to fix some of these problems, but owners of Phenom X3s are bound to run into such issues over the next little while as software developers adjust to unconventional core counts.

Emphasis added.

Re:Missed Marketing opportunity

[niko9]

...and sold it to the same Christian Fundamentalists who read the Lost Behind novels.

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]

Re:PC architecture review?

[skulgnome]

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.)

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[P1h3r1e3d13]

Sierpiski

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[P1h3r1e3d13]

OK so that's supposed to say "Sierpinski" with an acute accent over the "n." Apparently that character doesn't parse in the thread as it does in the "Post Comment" field. That's what I get for ignoring the "Preview" button. I imagine Anonymous Coward above me had the same problem.

Re:Jehovah or Neo

[AHumbleOpinion]

I don't know, when they double the speed of the 333Mhz processors, all of the CPU manufacturers labeled their chips as 667 Mhz. So, there must be some thought given to the the Christian tech sector. Of course, it could just be that they thought there were more Christian CPU buyers than Satanic ones.

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. ;-)

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[BJZQ8]

3-cylinder engines suffer from the problem that you can never get equal numbers of cylinders going up and down at the same time, so they have a primary imbalance. That results in additional weight and complication necessary to isolate the engine vibrations.

Re:3 cores sounds "wrong", but...

[John Betonschaar]

There's lots of new 3-cylinder cars driving around (at least here in Europe), first that comes to mind are the Citroen C1/Peugeot 107/Toyota Aygo (which are the same cars). But there's probably some more... There's 5-cylinder ones as well btw (Focus ST for example). And one of my friends' car has a 12-valve engine, 4 cylinder with 3 valves/cylinder... ;-)

Incorrect.

[Visaris]

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.

Re:less heat?

[Kjella]

The Phenoms are, sorry to say, power hogs compared to Intel. If you look at this:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3293&p=9 [anandtech.com]

You'll see that the X3 produces 20W more heat under load than a Q6600, which is a *much* higher performing part. Then you can look at this:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3272&p=5 [anandtech.com]

Which shows that the Q9300 (in stock right now) performs better and consumes a lot less than the Q6600 again, albeit at a higher price. In short, they're fighting against the last generation and losing.

Right now, the only thing I see the reviews counting as positive is that Intel doesn't have a HD decoding integrated chipset. The pricing is too close to the quads, and the benchmarks... well, they sorta come out ok if you take an average.

However, if you look at it more closely the dual-cores whup ass in non-multithreaded benchmarks like games and the quad-cores whup ass in properly multithreaded benchmarks like 3D and media encoding. Unless you're a very mixed user doing an even amount of both, the X3 falls between all chairs.I really fail to see the consumer group where this processor is the best buy.

Re:Stop the obsession with clock speed

[Uncle Focker]

To add further: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14606/7 [techreport.com]
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 [techreport.com]
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.