As a former AMD tester, I can tell you the tricores are indeed quads with something *wrong* with one of the cores. The core may not be turned off, and it may not be totally dysfunctional, but there is something wrong enough with it you *don't* want to use it...

Do I see paid off Intel trolls twisting the press again? Yes AMD's (ex ATI) junk blows by comparison to Intel and yes AMD is doing what it can with it’s asset smart *cough puss weak* wallet but you f***ers just love to kick em when they are down.

It’s incredible that sh** heads like you still suck the d**k of a conglomerate company that has and is still bullying many, many businesses. 

Have you completely forgotten Intel manipulated the market so it could spend less cash and park its fat, complacent ass on top of its huge assets and as a result the lowly customer had to pay through the nose.

You’re worse than Mac fanboys! It makes me wanna puke!

Hey Charlie (DAAMIT salesman),

Thanks for promoting ONLY DAAMIT producuts and licking my bum! You're cheque's in the mail!

Regards,
Hector

Exaclty dazzle, plus the extra stupid idea of putting 4 cores on one piece of silicon made K10 suck. Anyway, 45nm and larger cache could possibly save it ...

So this brings us to what 6 or 7 different desktop quads now for AMD? (for what they call a 'niche' market)

And you wonder why they can't make any money... are customers really demanding a 1.8GHz chip or is this simply of case of moving the bin low enough to catch the scraps?

1.8, 2.0, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5 (black and normal), 2.6 and I think one of these speed bins also has 2 different power bins... what is AMD thinking? No wonder their pricing is driven to garbage... with this many bins and the inability to price the top bin very high for performance reasons, it just drives the whole desktop line down further, especially with AMD driving triple cores between duals and quads. All this and no K10 dual cores, makes you wonder.

The 140Watt bin really drives home the 65nm process issues as you are seeing power fall off a cliff going from 2.3 to 2.6. The triple core idle speed should be fairly obvious - these are quad chips that couldn't make the power bins. People keep talking about triple cores being quads with one non-functional core (if they were obviously the idle power would be lower than a quad), the more likely scenario is these are working quads that could not make the thermal budget (again symptomatic of a less than stellar 65nm process). I guess it is simpler for the press to think of it as one non-working core... but then again it is simpler to think that SOI has some magical power reduction, too... simpler != reality.