AMD Triple-Core benchmarked

[G80]

How about we stop the "how about"?

[grimREEFER]

woah, so its weaker than a quad core but stronger than a dual core.
i could never have guessed lol

[Shintai]

woah, so its weaker than a quad core but stronger than a dual core.
i could never have guessed lol

Haha, ye!

[freeloader]

Who cares how it's made? Let's just hope AMD sells enough of them to stay in business. We all need the competition!

[Inteleron]

MY E6300 @ 3.5GHz hits arround 3100. So ur telling me amd's X3 & X4 are that slowwwww!!

[JumpingJack]

Dosent make sense. Do they profit somehow when they disable an existing core?, Why not just let it function as it normaly would?.

Actaully, it does make sense. AMD has designed a rather large die for their quad core, the side effect of doing monolithic. If one core has one defect, rendering one transistor useless, then that core is dead. They cannot sell it has a quad core because one of the 4 cores is nonfunctional.

They now have a choice, throw away that defective quad core and get no money for it, or disable one core call it a tri-core and sell it for something, albiet less than they would sell it as a quad.

It is not hard to understand, get something or get nothing. AMD chose to get something.

[Evil-Vincent]

How would these chips overclock? They are quad cores, but because 1 core is disabled they generate less heat, right?

[zakelwe]

There's nothing wrong with AMD selling 4 core cpu's that can only function as 3 cores due to a faulty 4th core, your neighbourhood graphics supplier has been doing that for years.

A 3 core part has a lot of advantages actually if you can enable or disable cores on the fly. It still has to be said that most software nowadays still likes single or duel cores best and so the extra cores up to four do a lot of times just wasting electricty and intial cost. Best to run a dual core most of the time and then enable the 3rd core for some of the time when needed. This depends on pricing though, if it is too close to Intel 4 core then that advantage is wiped out immediately.

Really AMD have to price the 3 core at the same cost as Intel 2 core, especially as Intel 2 core is faster.

Regards

Andy

[KTE]

I wouldn't mind if any CPU MFG allowed disabling cores on the fly through the OS with these new technologies. If they can throttle them, they should be able to do this to some extent. If possible, like Andy said, I would be running two cores most of the time and only enable the additional when needed.

[John600rr]

For comparison, my E6600 @ 2300mhz scores 2070. I'm interested in the pricing.

[G80]

Actaully, it does make sense. AMD has designed a rather large die for their quad core, the side effect of doing monolithic. If one core has one defect, rendering one transistor useless, then that core is dead. They cannot sell it has a quad core because one of the 4 cores is nonfunctional.

They now have a choice, throw away that defective quad core and get no money for it, or disable one core call it a tri-core and sell it for something, albiet less than they would sell it as a quad.

It is not hard to understand, get something or get nothing. AMD chose to get something.

Yes it was explained in the roadmap announcement, attached somewhere in the first page, so i think its pretty covered by now.

[zakelwe]

I wouldn't mind if any CPU MFG allowed disabling cores on the fly through the OS with these new technologies. If they can throttle them, they should be able to do this to some extent. If possible, like Andy said, I would be running two cores most of the time and only enable the additional when needed.

Well they seem to be doing that at Tahoe. Whether they had to reboot between settings is another matter of course.

What AMD need is something like the game profiles part of nvidia control panel where you set the parameters for that game when you use it like AA and AF etc.If AMD can do that then you can set the Phenom to run 1, 2, 3 or 4 cores for whatever EXE you are doing without having to think about keep setting it manually.

I guess we will have to see how it goes.

The main problem of course is that everyone has been waiting for a very long time for this. It seems like forever, and now we are being asked again to wait for another length of time to get rid of bugs, get the overclocking up and to wait for the supporting platform and software to be polished.

It's not surprising that people are just jumping for the currently far better product.

Lets hope for the real enthusiasts, and by here I do not mean the driveling fanboys as per my sig, that things get closer so either the performance or the cost boundaries are pushed to our advantage.

Regards
Andy

[Shintai]

You can not enable or disable CPU cores on the fly in mainstream OSes.

They simply aint designed for it. They would turn their guts out if you disabled a core while they ran.

[WeStSiDePLaYa]

You can not enable or disable CPU cores on the fly in mainstream OSes.

They simply aint designed for it. They would turn their guts out if you disabled a core while they ran.

You can effectively disable cores with even XP. All you do is prevent threads from running on it, which would keep it idle.

[Charles Wirth]

A cookie to the first person to find an phenom x2 with a clipped quad under the hood. It would be telling if that scenario popped up.

It seems the bad core ratio is high enough to complete an x3 line??

TDP might be a reason to clip a core.

You dont build good cores and disable them, that would be better yield on quads = lower price or correct profit.

Lets see a cinebench 10, does all the cores run evenly?

Yorkfield, core 4 always finishes first.

[KTE]

Currently there are constraints we know about which involve the BIOS more than the OS because every time an interrupt is received or a broadcast sent the core not disabled through the BIOS will have to become active and woken up. That's not the case with a disabled core since the OS doesn't recognize its existence. But if you could cut core frequency to near zero and OS schedulers can assign threads to specific cores before execution with a future OS, then that would be a decent work around.

What AMD need is something like the game profiles part of nvidia control panel where you set the parameters for that game when you use it like AA and AF etc.If AMD can do that then you can set the Phenom to run 1, 2, 3 or 4 cores for whatever EXE you are doing without having to think about keep setting it manually.

There's a program which allows you to do something similar although it won't disable a core, you can choose the affinity of every executable to a specific core. It's called SetAffinity, I've used it for quite a long while now.

[tux08902]

The Phenom X3 is just a Phenom X4 with one core disabled, which is probably damaged. The same goes for Phenom X2.

[The_Beast]

The only reason I would get one would be for the cool name

tri-core

[Kingcarcas]

Stop beating the guy up he was just asking for proof

makes sense, all software devs said they are finding it hard to split up the work to more than 3 main threads

I wonder if the Xbox360 has anything to do with that...

[SADS]

whats kinda bugging me is that in the benches shown there the phenom X2 is hardly performing over the old athlon X2. i would have expexted a larger difference between a previous and new generation CPU to be honest.

i only just got my quad core (good old poor students) and its hardly broken a sweat on anything yet, its my first intel core since i got into computers years ago as often the AMD ones were cheaper and clocked nicely (mainly reffering to the 1700xp's that could clock to 3000xp's).

but i've been very impressed with the new quad, it clocked very very well, was priced well and it feels leagues ahead to be honest.

[Shintai]

You can effectively disable cores with even XP. All you do is prevent threads from running on it, which would keep it idle.

There is a universal proportional difference between avoiding a thread to run on a core. And then tell the kernel and HAL what to do...

And idle is a far far difference from being disabled aswell. The idle can still run code.

[villa1n]

How much difference in thermal output does 3 vs 4 make... assuming they get a handle on their process, a tricore may be a good fit in the mobile market, vs a higher clocked dual... of course depending on tdp.

[JumpingJack]

Yes it was explained in the roadmap announcement, attached somewhere in the first page, so i think its pretty covered by now.

Ooops. Sorry.

[adamsleath]

if tri core cheaper than intel quad then they may sell some.

Obviously for MANY price is the most important limiting factor...or else everyone would have a penryn quad
so it needs to be significantly cheaper than q6600 imo.

[JumpingJack]

if tri core cheaper than intel quad then they may sell some.

Obviously for MANY price is the most important limiting factor...or else everyone would have a penryn quad
so it needs to be significantly cheaper than q6600 imo.

It's gotta be.... if a Phenom 2.3 GHz is going for roughly the same as a Q6600, then an X3 at 2.3 GHz must be less than that.