AMD are officially announcing that, following a couple of days of out-in-the-open speculation, triple-core Phenom processors are being added to their roadmap.
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AMD add triple-core processors to desktop CPU roadmap
- Thread starter B3D News
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I already predicted this (Triple-cores).
I don't think demand and yields will be a big problem. Early adopters want X4's, while AMD piles up X3's. Once fully functional quad-core yields are steady they can lower prices and let the mainstream in on the goods, with some attractive X3 prices and good availability. Even when yields are really good it's all about selling that extra few percent of chips that otherwise end in the bin.
And if yields do stay low they can probably sell X3's that are clocked a little higher than the X4's to keep them attractive. With high yields they can use higher clocked X3's to keep the prices closer to X4's. So either way the yields turn out this gives AMD a lot of maneuverability. Nice revenge for Intel's dual-dual cores. And maybe AMD is already planning X6-8's....
This creates some extra work for software developers though, since an odd number of cores makes it harder to split tasks into even subtasks hierarchically...
I don't think demand and yields will be a big problem. Early adopters want X4's, while AMD piles up X3's. Once fully functional quad-core yields are steady they can lower prices and let the mainstream in on the goods, with some attractive X3 prices and good availability. Even when yields are really good it's all about selling that extra few percent of chips that otherwise end in the bin.
And if yields do stay low they can probably sell X3's that are clocked a little higher than the X4's to keep them attractive. With high yields they can use higher clocked X3's to keep the prices closer to X4's. So either way the yields turn out this gives AMD a lot of maneuverability. Nice revenge for Intel's dual-dual cores. And maybe AMD is already planning X6-8's....
This creates some extra work for software developers though, since an odd number of cores makes it harder to split tasks into even subtasks hierarchically...
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Good software designer does not divide tasks by number of physical cores.
In general, yes, but it depends on the tasks. If you have small tasks that have to be synchronised before starting the next task, it's often faster to split them into equal subtasks than to split them into tiny tasks that need extra scheduling.
And I wasn't only talking about performance. It's quite possible that software runs well on dual-cores and quad-cores but deadlocks or gives incorrect results on triple-cores. So I was just saying that and odd-numbered number of cores is something to be aware of now.
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