The company is positioning its forthcoming x86 Phenom triple-core processors at the high-end of the mainstream dual-core market and the low-end of the emerging quad-core market, said AMD desktop marketing manager Brent Barry. It would play in the middle, he said. The triple core product is positioned for that mainstream person, but at the high-end of the mainstream.
As such, the triple-core Phenoms would be priced between dual- and quad-core chips, he said.
AMD previously said it would launch quad-core Phenoms later this year. Barry declined to comment on unannounced products. But, when asked, he said future odd-numbered cores from AMD are something that should be on the table.
Triple core would give as much as a 50% performance boost in a perfectly-scaled application and scenario, Barry said. For sure, it would increase performance in content creation applications and multitasking situations, he said. He was unable to provide a performance benefit average for triple-core chips, but said they would offer far better performance than a lot of high-end dual-core scenarios. It would be comparable to low-end quad-core processors, he said. There is some overlap there, Barry said.
For enterprises, triple-core processors promise advantages in desktop virtualization. Virtualization can eat cores like crazy, Barry said. So, if you are taking a triple core and using two cores to do your base work and virtualizing another core, then it makes for a sweet spot to still have that additional core available.
Triple-core also would be beneficial for graphics-intensive applications, including Vista operating system, he said.
AMD touted its triple-cores as the world’s first PC processors to integrate three computational cores on a single die of silicon, in a press release. Barry confirmed they would be built on a multi-core architecture, in a similar style to AMD’s quad-core Opterons for servers, released last week. The statement is a not-so-subtle dig at Intel, which has packaged two dual-core chips as a quad-core processor, rather than being built from a native quad-core design.
Our View
Releasing triple-core microprocessors is a shrewd move by AMD because it targets Intel at the high-end of its dual-core line and the low-end of its quad-core offerings.
Triple cores may spur more desktop virtualization in businesses, which seems to be its most beneficial application.
It is far from certain that Intel will release its own triple-core chips any time soon. For AMD, native triple-core design was a relatively straight-forward engineering task; its native quad-core architecture was the basis for all its multi-core chip designs, including dual- and triple-core.
