

New Phenom triple-core processor coming in 2008









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What market segment is this aimed at?
By jak3676 on 9/17/2007 11:22:55 PM , Rating: 4
This seems to be a really odd marketing move.

Performance wise, there is still limited use for mainstream multi-core CPU's. We are starting to see some good mult-threaded apps, but its still a minority of support. Just about everyone will see a boost in moving to a dual core CPU, as this allows one core to focus on a single main thead (games, video editing, etc) while the other core handles all the background tasks, but many users may not even notice the difference from a single vs dual-core CPU. For this mainstream market there is little use for any more than 2 cores.

For the performance crowd (and I think there are a growing number of us), the tri-core system (gee that sounds like a Zelda reference) will probably not gain any huge following unless AMD prices them signifigantly cheaper than the quad-core CPU's. It will cost AMD the same amount to manufacture a tri-core CPU as a quad-core CPU so it seems like AMD will loose potential revenue with every tri-core CPU sold.

The only way I see this making scense is if AMD is having some production issues where some quad-core CPU's develop a glitch that only yields three functioning cores. Intel did have some similar issues with their original core CPU's. But if this is the case I'm guessing you won't see many of the tri-core CPU's being implemented.

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
By jak3676 on 9/17/2007 11:35:43 PM , Rating: 2
Added thoughts

Disabling one core won't save you much in terms of wattage on AMD's current architecture. All of the cores run at the same voltage, although they can clock themselves lower for some saved wattage. At first I was thinking that this may allow you to cut the TDP to 3/4 of the original quad-core, but I'm guessing it would be more like 7/8 or 9/10 of the original TDP.

I don't see this being an added benifit for overclocking either. With the majority of your chip still running at full power, you'd end up with some odd heating patterns, but probably only very limited advantage in terms of overclocking. You may be able to squeeze a few more MHz out of it, but I think the dual-core versions will probably prove better for O/C than the tri's. We'll definately have to wait for some tests on this point.

The only advantage I can see would be that you end up with more efefctive L3 cache per core (same amount, just shared between fewer cores). I kinda doubt that there will be programs to take advantage of this, but it may have some use in programs that need to share large amounts of data in between cores. I think I'm reaching too far on this idea - maybe I'm just not seeing it.

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
By sackland on 9/17/2007 11:53:56 PM , Rating: 2
Key wording here being "current architecture", if these CPUs were used on one of the new motherboards with split power planes I bet you would see a power improvement over quad core. In addition if they can do like the GPU guys already do and have fusible logic, they could fully disable a core at packaging and keep it from using power.

(nVidia and ATI can sometimes fuse or turn off unusable shaders and sections of the cores which is how we sometimes end up with lower SKUs of the products with lesser power and performance yet same clocks)

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
By jak3676 on 9/18/2007 12:23:50 AM , Rating: 2
in terms of "current architecture", the split power plane is only a split between the memory controller and the cores - it is not a split between the cores.

from Anand Tech's article

AMD has made numerous improvements compared to the K8 core:
The FPU unit can be turned off when not needed
Clock gating is implemented much better
Each core can run at its own frequency (but the voltage is the highest needed by either core)
Power for the core and memory controller are split

I do agree that there would be some power savings here, but we're not talking about disabling 1/4 of the chip. With ~ 460 million transistors for the entire CPU, the number of non-cache transistors in the Barcelona core is ~250 million total or ~62 million per core. So disabling one core cuts out just over 13% of the total transistors.

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
By jak3676 on 9/18/2007 2:06:44 PM , Rating: 4
I don't really mind getting rated up or down for my usual rambling - but can someone explain why this post got rated down? This is straigt fact and numbers. If I quoted a number wrong, please let us all know.

By deeznuts on 9/18/2007 11:08:17 PM , Rating: 2
Fanboys, just ignore it. They sometimes act irrationally, so asking or thinking about it rationally isn't going to get you anywhere.

By mars777 on 9/19/2007 3:23:16 PM , Rating: 3
Maybe because individual cores can already save power and clock by themselves with cool&quiet.
This is only made to clock differently the IMC thus saving power when it's not 100% loaded with memory requests.

By jak3676 on 9/17/2007 11:57:31 PM , Rating: 2
I agree that it doesn't necessarily have to be a matter of having a core that won't work at all. If one of them won't clock as high as the other three it may make more sense to just disable it.

i.e. 3 cores are stable at 2.5GHz, but one of the cores isn't stable past 2.0GHz - so do you sell it as a 2.5GHz tri-core CPU or a 2.0GHz quad-core?

I would thik that AMD would be more interested in fixing the root level manufactuing problem though.

Another way to think about it, may be that AMD has been able to boost the clock speed across the CPU, but only by cutting power to one of the cores. (in other words there is not a problem with any of the cores, but if you disable any one of them, then you can clock the rest of the CPU higher.) If this is the case though it would seem to suggest that there is an archetectual problem with heat dissipation though.

By praeses on 9/18/2007 12:53:13 PM , Rating: 2
As jak3676 said:
you end up with more effective L3 cache per core (same amount, just shared between fewer cores)

(corrected typo)

If this is marketted correctly this could be quite significant for price/performance. Approach wise, its not much different than the Radeon 9500 of yesteryear although we probably are not going to be able to re-enable the core on select cpus. I do not recall many people complaining about the 9500 even if they weren't planning on unlocking those pipelines.

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?




RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
By afkrotch on 9/18/07, Rating: 0
RE: What market segment is this aimed at?


RE: What market segment is this aimed at?

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
He was just correcting AFKrotch.

RE: What market segment is this aimed at?
I wouldn't say correcting AFKrotch, but clarifying.



For Example:




By Targon on 9/18/2007 6:30:53 AM , Rating: 2
With Vista doing a bit more behind the scenes, dual-core is already seen as very important, if not essential. Now, with this in mind, adding just one more core over the current dual-core processors MAY help a lot of end-users in terms of overall system performance, even if current single-threaded applications see no significant improvement.

In addition to this, as multi-threaded applications finally begin to show up in the next year or two, having the extra core will give a bit of a boost without having to pay a price premium for a quad core processor.

So, the market segment this is aimed at is for those who would be talked into getting a quad-core system but looking at the price, would want something a little cheaper.

It may also be that AMD has found that their fab process has a good number of processors that have failed due to one bad core, and this would be a way to sell the "defective" processors. There really is no way to know at this point if this is the case or not(if the three-core fade from the roadmap quickly, we can speculate that it was fab problems that inspired this).







By imperator3733 on 9/18/2007 11:10:25 AM , Rating: 3

It seems to me that these tri-cores would be quad-cores that have one deffective core. For chips like that, AMD has two choices.

1) Disable the deffective core and one other core and sell it as a pseudo-Kuma dual core at the dual core price


2) Disable only the deffective core and sell it as a tri-core at a price somewhere between similarly clocked dual and quad cores.

By releasing tri-cores, AMD can choose option 2, getting more revenue due to the slightly higher price.


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