AMD prepares three-core processors

[hollo]

i wouldn't go so far as to call an AMD tri-core damage control - that's like saying selling a lower speed CPU is damage control, when really it's an expected result of the randomness of the manufacturing process - some processors will clock a lot further than others, so you have a mixture of higher and lower clocked parts.

similarly if you have a quad core die with a defect on one core, disable that core and sell the other three, its good business sense. one core is only 25% of the total yield (well less than 25% if you take the l3 cache into consideration), which is less than the clockspeed difference between the lowest and highest binned parts in a typical processor series (eg 36% speed difference between e6320 and x6800).

AMD are gonna produce a lot of quad cores, so i'm glad they won't discard 3 perfectly good cores because of a random manufacturing defect in the 4th one. if it was up to me the ability to disable a core would be a BIOS option, cos a quad core will only overclock as fast as its weakest core,