AMD prepares three-core processors

[Donnie27]

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 its 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. 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,

Actually that's called speed binning. Intel speed bins two Dual cores before there's a Quad Core before they make a MCM. Now it would be pretty stupid to use one with one of the Cores dead, wouldn't it? They throw it in the pile meant for Core Solo and sell it as such. One bad core means AMD is now selling 3 instead of 4. Everyone knows this is bound to happen (any one in the Fab business has failed parts=P). That AMD's selling them is not drawing evil looks, it's their trying to say Hey WOW here's something great Spin!

Intel has far more control over MCM than AMD does with its Monolithic design, just common sense here. Even AMD acknowledged as much.