But you would have to think that these 3 core units are just quads with a core that has something a bit faulty in it so that core is turned off.
Thus my thought is that they have designed a single maximum spec chip. The early batches will have many flaws, so they are released with a lower clock. Others in the quad core line will have too many faults in a core so that core is turned off and we get 3 core units or 2 core units.
As they iron the faults out of the production, speeds will increase.
The whole thing in repackaging a single product into a variety of products is called Value Adding.
An Athlon is an Opteron, but with bits turned off and a normal clock (the opteron was possibly clocked lower for stability)

Phillips/ BTS did similar in the early CCD days, they picked the best of the bunch and handed the remainder to Sony who passed what they didn't want to the next etc. So the cheap nasty cameras from companies who weren't part of the design licensing had really low quality CCD sensors, but they all came from the same line/ plant.

http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopCPUFilter.aspx
in the Desktop chips section, anyways. . .

And the Opterons are either
Third-Gen BA, or Second-Gen F2 or F3.

( *always* check amdcompare.com to discover which chip is best for the application, if you're after an AMD CPU -- things like getting a non-fractional multiplier between CPU & RAM can, in some situations, make a big difference )

Just read on Friday that AMD is lowering all its Processor prices, X2 & others for Addition of new lines, as Quad, next month. Also announced is NEW line of Single & Dual Core coming. Barcelona B3 stepping tested "Not Worse than B2, yet Not Better", Apparently Software Update did more, however little that helped present sinking ship. AMD is presently $6.85 or $4.6 Billion for whole Shebang.
Thomas Drashek

At least your not bashing AMD. Don't you see, we need dcomptition for inovation and pricing. AMD goes Intel might go back to the 32 bit, and hwo's to stop them? lol

According to
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/white_papers_and_tech_docs/41322.pdf
the B3 Phenom still has one or two issues that I would characterize as show-stopper, unless fixed in the BIOS:
244 A DIV Instruction Followed Closely By Other Divide Instructions May Yield Incorrect Results
280 Time Stamp Counter May Yield An Incorrect Value

I fail to see how the BIOS could fix 244 at all, and I'd bet any fix for 280 (if feasible) slows down reading the time stamp counter by at least an order of magnitude.

Francois, the linked whitepaper references BA and B2 revisions only. B3 appears nowhere in the document.

Only 5 quadcore desktop options? that simply ain't gonna cut it. 

With huge steps of 100MHz between products, what happens to us little guys who want to find that 2.2597 GHz quadcore sweet spot! AMD needs to get at least 4-5 more speed bins out!

OK, on a serious note this really is ABSURD! Isn't there also a 2.6GHz planned too? Throw in a slew of tricores and the only thing missing is...

Oh yeah that's right, HOW ABOUT SOME DUAL CORES!?!?!?

Even though Intel would love to go back to 32 Bit, Microsoft has been pushing the x64 bit on the server side and so now I don't think Intel would have a choice in the matter.

How many MS customers have SQL Server 2005 x64