AMD To Offer Three Core Chip

AMD Curious about quad-core but not quite sure if you’re ready to make the leap from dual-core? Well you, my friend, are in luck. AMD’s got a big, fat defective quad-core new three-core chip coming out in Q1 2008.

This could really go either way. The concept of a three-core chip may end up confusing non-technical consumers as well as insulting the more technical among us with marketing spin that would allude to the idea that consumers want something that bridges the gap between two and four cores.

The fact of the matter is that these three-core chips will likely be quad-core chips that contain a core that’s not functioning at the level it should be. It’s smart on AMD’s part because it allows them to use quad-core chips that would otherwise go to waste. It just needs to be marketed correctly. An honest campaign comes to mind, for instance, "The AMD Three-Core Processor. It’s a Quad-Core, only broken." Somehow I have the feeling that AMD won’t be using that marketing strategy, however.

It’s similar to Intel’s Celeron 300A chip from long ago. You could overclock the hell out of those things because they were often defective 400- or 500-megahertz processors. They were pretty popular with people who wanted to build their own computer. These AMD chips could be too — they just need to be inexpensive and geek-friendly.

AMD tries for the cycle with triple-core chip [CNET News.com]