Crazy Buddhist
08-15-2009, 11:41 AM
Well ... this is a bit of a shocker ....
As most of us know chip manufacturers have tested and sorted chips to grade them after production for some years. AMD Opterons and AMD X64's were the same chips except the Opterons were the more stable from the batch.
With the invention of dual and more cores this offered more scope to the manufacturers.
Doing a build for my nephew and started looking into Phenom tri core-chips I assumed the tri-cores were just quad cores with a faulty core. At first look this is indeed the case:
Thought as much.
From Hardwarezone.com (http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=2908&cid=19&pg=2)
"To be brief, the line-up of Phenom II processors can generally be divided into three series: 900, 800 and 700. The 900 series represents chips that offer the full performance features whereas the other two series are formed by die harvesting, which means re-using chips that have had certain controlled defects. Controlled because the thorough testing by AMD has validated them usable and pose no cause for concern. This is a common practice throughout the industry for many years now.
The 800 series is formed using chips with four fully functioning cores, but with defects in the cache, leaving them with only 4MB of useable L3 cache. The 700 series, on the other hand, has one faulty core, but with a fully functional cache. As such the 700 series is sort of unique and the only triple-core product in the market. This gives users a wider variety of options for a particular budget depending on their usage needs. For example, if you don't dabble with programs don't benefit much from quad cores, you could actually get better performance going with a triple-core processor that's clocked higher instead."
But then I stumbled across people discussing "unlocking" the fourth core on their Phenom:
... a little more digging and I discovered this video which explains why you can "unlock" the fourth core of your Phenom tri-core .... SOMETIMES ....
.... because *sometimes* AMD do not have enough quad cores that are faulty to meet demand for tri-cores, they simply disable one PERFECTLY GOOD core and sell the chip as a tri-core:
VGKBXgbmCOk
So if you have invested in a tri-core Phenom to save some money ... I suggest you investigate ... if you can unlock the core it is because it is not faulty but has been handicapped. If you can't unlock it then it really is a tri-core with one dead leg after all.
There's an extra 33% computing power in some of your machines just waiting for you to unlock it.
CrazyB
As most of us know chip manufacturers have tested and sorted chips to grade them after production for some years. AMD Opterons and AMD X64's were the same chips except the Opterons were the more stable from the batch.
With the invention of dual and more cores this offered more scope to the manufacturers.
Doing a build for my nephew and started looking into Phenom tri core-chips I assumed the tri-cores were just quad cores with a faulty core. At first look this is indeed the case:
Thought as much.
From Hardwarezone.com (http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=2908&cid=19&pg=2)
"To be brief, the line-up of Phenom II processors can generally be divided into three series: 900, 800 and 700. The 900 series represents chips that offer the full performance features whereas the other two series are formed by die harvesting, which means re-using chips that have had certain controlled defects. Controlled because the thorough testing by AMD has validated them usable and pose no cause for concern. This is a common practice throughout the industry for many years now.
The 800 series is formed using chips with four fully functioning cores, but with defects in the cache, leaving them with only 4MB of useable L3 cache. The 700 series, on the other hand, has one faulty core, but with a fully functional cache. As such the 700 series is sort of unique and the only triple-core product in the market. This gives users a wider variety of options for a particular budget depending on their usage needs. For example, if you don't dabble with programs don't benefit much from quad cores, you could actually get better performance going with a triple-core processor that's clocked higher instead."
But then I stumbled across people discussing "unlocking" the fourth core on their Phenom:
... a little more digging and I discovered this video which explains why you can "unlock" the fourth core of your Phenom tri-core .... SOMETIMES ....
.... because *sometimes* AMD do not have enough quad cores that are faulty to meet demand for tri-cores, they simply disable one PERFECTLY GOOD core and sell the chip as a tri-core:
VGKBXgbmCOk
So if you have invested in a tri-core Phenom to save some money ... I suggest you investigate ... if you can unlock the core it is because it is not faulty but has been handicapped. If you can't unlock it then it really is a tri-core with one dead leg after all.
There's an extra 33% computing power in some of your machines just waiting for you to unlock it.
CrazyB