AMD denies locking down cores

...why my next CPU is gonna be Phenom.

Chipzilla would probably cripple this. or rather it would not be made possible in the 1st place

Not all Phenom three-cores suffer from a defective core hence the ability to unlock them at the rated clock and some at higher clocks. Intel's manufacturing is far from perfect as you claim and they probably end up destroying defective quad cores.

Intel makes a few bad chips. They can just mask it with sheer volume of manufacturing and sweep some lemons under the rug. AFAIK GloFo only has 1 45nm plant in operation while Intel has at least 3. If Intel didn't have the capacity (or the capital for capacity) I believe that they would be doing the same. Hell, Some Celerons are defective Pentium/Core chips (bad cache/2nd core in dual die), not just redesigned cheap dies(although many are).

For that matter, Aren't the bottom-barrel Nehalem-Xeons Dual cores? (newegged) Yes, the Xeon-E5502 1.86GHz dual-core. This is the cheapest Nehalem and the only dual core? Me thinks chip-harvesting has occured my friend.

BTW, I thought that Intel stated that they may use defective Octo-Xeons as Hexa-Xeons?

I'm not trying to bash here. Just do some research before you call BS on someone.

The commenter above is an idiot. Intel has bad silicon just like everyone else. The difference is, Intel's CPUs up to this point have not been true quad cores. They were actually two sets of dual cores slapped on the same piece of silicon. If it didn't pass as a quad, they just sold them as duals. Also, if they were specced at a certain speed or TDP and didn't pass, they just downclocked them to where they were stable. Not to mention the fact that the "Core 2 x86 flagship architecture, already has 67 errata on file, with only 20 planned fixes. That means 47 errata will persist in future steppings." See this link for the full article: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intels-conroe-has-67-errata-bugs-20060824/

So as far as this being something that Intel doesn't do, take your Intel fanboi'isms and go troll somewhere else. Check your facts before you open your mouth.

Spot on mate, hollowfox too. BTW do I really have to display my tech certs just to post? and BTW I do know how silicon works.

Come on Rob we all remember Athlon X2 and the kicking Pentium got.

I was going to add something else to what Robo has to say. "Don't come telling me about how Intel builds processors?"

What? Don't you want to reason then?

Talking about excuses to being idiotic.

Do you even know how a wafer yields its processors?

I just got an X3-720 from newegg and paired it with a BioStar board, and it's running as an X4 @ 3.2ghz with the stock cooler.

AMD rox.

Stupid people are amusing, until I remember that there are so many of them, they actually have a lot of influence on our economy. AMD aren't, and never had to "engineer" a special technique to enable them to sell "faulty chips". That's like saying someone had to "engineer" dented tins at the supermarket to be able to sell them at a lower price.

All silicon wafers have defects upon manufacture, since they're cut from what is essentially a huge crystal ingot. If you've ever studied chemistry or physics you'd have learned about how crystal lattice structures (including metals) can have fractures and flaws; there is rarely a perfect crystalline structure. With a circular wafer, you tend to have more flaws near the edge and fewer in the centre. Therefore, the larger your die-size, the more likely your chip is to be created overlying a fault. To use an extremely simple analogy, think of the game "Minesweeper" - normally you click on one square at a time, but imagine if you had to click on 4, or 9. This would of course be analogous to increasing your die size but you'd be more likely to hit a mine.

Intel and AMD have both been selling what are now for some reason called "faulty" chips for years. Due to the significant proportion of a chip devoted to cache memory, often it would be the cache area that contained the fault, which is why you'd see CPUs sold with varying amounts of cache (some of it would be disabled and the CPU sold as a lower speed/performance rating). In the days of slot-based CPUs, the cores were so large that to mitigate this problem (amongst other reasons), the cache memory was included on separate chips.

The same applies to disabling cores. Both companies have been doing this since the dawn of their existence but it is only recently that dullards have been accusing AMD of selling faulty chips.

Of course Intel would never tell customers that it goes through the same practices as its competitor - how else would it exploit their ignorance?

Hi, H Ruiz,

For AMD and GlobalFoundries to leave the competition behind, does IT then need a cache of clean memory ie non-corrupted and ideally non-corruptible?

Or would that be more Immaculate Source, which is QuITe Teutonic a Concept ...... and in a Virtualised Information Processing ...... would it be CyberIntelAIgent Fact Placement and Binary Propaganda for Plain Text Reading Virtual AIMachinery building Cloud InfraStructures for and with NINJAs .... Networks InterNetworking Java Applications.

Does AMD do Lead in Cloud Stratification/Hierarchy ...... Vorsprung durch AITechnICQ?

Is not Virtualisation the same as Realisation, only ITs Beta and therefore, with SMARTer Guidance, is the Future Bound to be Better than the Present?

The Posit here is that with C42 Quantum Control Systems is it a Guaranteed Virtual Reality for Real with NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive AIR&dDs .... which would be akin to Enigmatically Coded Magical Mystery Turing Bombe Sorties in Purple Prose.

YEAHHH! GO DRASHEK!!1 lolol

"We've reported on this matter before, and ECS has even sent us a new BIOS for its A790GXM-AD3 Black Series mainboard that we'll be testing later in the day. µ"

What were the results with the new BIOS?
Could you unlock cores?
What version/date was this BIOS?