Quote Originally Posted by Easybeat View Post
They can't that is why they continually lose money.
Nope,the 2 cores did not meet the frequency or TDP targets so they "turned them off" and launched a dual core. Usually this happens when the wafer that was meant to be "tuned" for high performance yields a number of dice that fail to meet the targeted specifications.There is also a "tune for low power" option that AMD uses for EE Opterons and Phenoms with "e" letter in product model number.

Anyhow,no matter what it is(DC,Tri or QC) amd does make money on every Deneb die they sell.The cost is roughly 50$ (total) per chip,so you can see they do not lose money because they sell it with a loss.They lose money because their server sales slowed down last 2 quarters(nehalem and economic crisis) and they pay off the credit they took to buy ati.