Phenom II x3 710 run with 4 core!

[informal]

Intel can BS as much as possible but sooner or later they'll do the same, I'm surprised they haven't already. I don't believe AMD disabled a perfectly good faster core and then ship 4 slower ones for lower price when they need money.

With Nehalem based Xeons they already do this .Not only core disabling( quad ->dual),but lower L3 amounts,lower QPI/IMC speeds etc. It's perfectly logical thing to do.Now they have a monolithic x86 quad core so they can do it too .