Triple Core Phenom 8600 Benchmarked

[Donnie27]

Not only that, but the wolfdales will almost certainly use much less power and will be much better overclockers on top of offering better performance on a majority of applications. AMD will have to price these below the cheapest Wolfdale, well below.

QFT and what I was hinting at.

[freeloader]

Sort of off topic but how do apps handle 3 cores. For example if something is optimized for 4 cores, does it use all 3 or just 2?

The application will spawn threads based on the number of cores in the system. Use Cinebench as an example. If you have two cores, you'll see two parts of the screen rendering, three cores, three parts, etc...

As for pricing, I believe AMD will price these cores just above their X2 line, but below the Quadcore. In the neighbourhood of $150.

[Ugly n Grey]

I think the pricing will all take a dump when Intel reprices in spring to cut the bottom out of their 65nm parts. In other words, less than a 150 dollar part.

I'd take one for free to play with it but I can't see shelling out any serious coin to use this.

[hollo]

Amazing to see the amount of dumb responses, when several people have allready pointed out that the TLB fix hasn't been disabled.
This chip will be amazing value, and intel will have nothing against it.
Owning the high end is not everything.

assuming k10 has the same performance-per-clock as 45nm c2d (generous to k10) and you have a program that scales perfectly to 3 cores (very generous to the k10 tri-core) then a 2.6ghz k10 tri would be as fast as a... let's see... 2.6*1.5 = 3.9ghz wofldale

the reality is that a 45nm c2d @ 3.9ghz would slaughter a 2.6ghz k10 tri in pretty much everything.
even an overclocked k8 would be faster than a k10 tri-core most of the time.
i don't know what kind of workloads you think 3 slow cores will excell at.

it'll be an OEM chip where general consumers can say "oh look, three cores, i'll take that over the Intel dual core system at the same price", because for people who can overclock an m0 stepping e4300 would be a better buy

[Epsilon84]

assuming k10 has the same performance-per-clock as 45nm c2d (generous to k10) and you have a program that scales perfectly to 3 cores (very generous to the k10 tri-core) then a 2.6ghz k10 tri would be as fast as a... let's see... 2.6*1.5 = 3.9ghz wofldale

the reality is that a 45nm c2d @ 3.9ghz would slaughter a 2.6ghz k10 tri in pretty much everything.
even an overclocked k8 would be faster than a k10 tri-core most of the time.
i don't know what kind of workloads you think 3 slow cores will excell at.

it'll be an OEM chip where general consumers can say "oh look, three cores, i'll take that over the Intel dual core system at the same price", because for people who can overclock an m0 stepping e4300 would be a better buy

Well, of course reality would work out that way since K10 is nowhere near the IPC of 45nm Core 2. That, plus the fact that not all software scales linearly with core count, means Phenom tri-core has no chance of outperforming Wolfdales, unless they can get clockspeeds up drastically. By my rough calculations they'd need to close to within a 10% clockspeed gap with Wolfdales to be competitive on a multithreading level, and lets not even mention single or double threaded performance. Let's also ignore the power consumption and overclockablity of Wolfdale. From a purely performance oriented point of view, Phenom tri-cores will be nothing more than budget alternatives to X2s, with slightly higher multithreaded performance at the expense of single/dual threaded performance.

However, all this is moot to your average user. If AMD can market these properly (perception is everything, look how many P4s Intel sold ) and try to ram home the concept that core count is everything (as opposed to clockspeed is everything in P4) then they may well get a few sales from people thinking 3 -> 2.

[hollo]

hmm i can barely work out what i was trying to say a few hours ago with that clockspeed comparison... urgh

probably something like-
an overclocked wolfdale is so much better than an overclocked phenom tri-core it's not funny, how could you possibly defend such a chip on XS you infidel :p