I had seen an old post about this on The Register back in September, tagged it in del.icio.us, but forgot to go back and comment on it. The post describes Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) offering their Phenom desktop CPUs with three processing cores to compete with Intel's dual-core CPUs:
"Of course, no one sets out to make a three-core product - AMD is simply being commercially canny. Of all the quad-core chips it punches out, some will have cores that are dead or not up to scratch. AMD can't sell them as four-core products, and while it might have once sold them as dual-core chips, by disabling one of the remaining cores, it now plans to offer them as three-core CPUs.
That allows it to not only sell chips it might otherwise have had to discard or offer as cheaper, two-core parts, but also allows it to position the three-core products as superior to Intel's rival Core 2 Duo chip."
While I applaud AMD for this thrifty undertaking, I'm wondering how many people are actually willing to go with a three-core CPU especially now that quad-core processors are available. The pricing on the tri-core processors would have to be very attractive, possibly competitive with an Intel dual-core.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan of AMD's products and an early adopter of the Opteron family when it was first offered in HP's ProLiant server line and I really believe the AMD HyperTransport technology offers a significant performance advantage over Intel's architecture, but I would really like to see some benchmarks comparing an AMD three-core processor against the dual & quad siblings from AMD and their rivals from Intel.
What do you think? Would you be willing to use an AMD three-core if the price was right? Do you see this type of product being used on a business-class workstation or would it more likely be adopted for home or high-end gaming?
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