Phenom Cheap?

Twist86

Twist86

Active Member
So I am curious I was looking at Phenoms and Intel quads today...sort of a "ha ha can't buy me!" but I like to look at them.

I noticed Phenom has 9500 and 9550 and same speed but 40-50 bucks more and I am curious whats the difference? It does it to almost all the phenoms 9600 and 9650 etc etc Why is the same speed more expensive between the 50 and 00 line?

Also I noticed a Tri-core what the hell is that and would any game apps even use them? Never heard of "tri core support" on a game just dual and quad :P
 
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As you can imagine, a tri-core is a little faster than a dual, little slower than a quad, if you're running apps that can use multi-core. In essence, a tri-core is basically a quad-core with one bad core. AMD produced a good number of bum quads, and instead of wasting money and throwing them away, marketed them as tri-core.
 
Lol...bad quads? Homeboy smooth, get your facts straight buddy. Sure some quads are bad and then they do remarket them as tri's. But how about when they actually want to manufacture them? They do that too you know. Same with ALL Hard drive companies. They make a 500Gb hard drive, sell it as an 80 gb, by putting an unsearchable partition on the drive. Also, for the tri-cores, they sometimes just disable an extra core and market it. Sometimes is also happens with dual cores and single cores. At least AMD didn't just slap on two dual's on a die and call it a quad.
 
Vizy93 said:
Lol...bad quads? Homeboy smooth, get your facts straight buddy. Sure some quads are bad and then they do remarket them as tri's. But how about when they actually want to manufacture them? They do that too you know. Same with ALL Hard drive companies. They make a 500Gb hard drive, sell it as an 80 gb, by putting an unsearchable partition on the drive. Also, for the tri-cores, they sometimes just disable an extra core and market it. Sometimes is also happens with dual cores and single cores. At least AMD didn't just slap on two dual's on a die and call it a quad.
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props to REAL quad cores...

yeah the xx50 represents a fix in the erratum bug that messed with earlier Phenoms, i'd definately buy one with a xx50 suffix.
 
smoothjk said:
As you can imagine, a tri-core is a little faster than a dual, little slower than a quad, if you're running apps that can use multi-core. In essence, a tri-core is basically a quad-core with one bad core. AMD produced a good number of bum quads, and instead of wasting money and throwing them away, marketed them as tri-core.
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Like Vizy said
Tri-cores are Quad cores with one core turned off. Nothing 'bad'... :rolleyes:
 
Yea. I'm a bit of a fan boy, but i would never flat out dis any company just because other people are.

Mr. Johanssen said:
props to REAL quad cores...
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"if you ain't know, now you know":P

ellanky said:
Like Vizy said
Tri-cores are Quad cores with one core turned off. Nothing 'bad'... :rolleyes:
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http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070917-amds-triple-threat-the-tri-core-phenom.html

Yea so just to build on it, the second para of that article say's exactly what ellanky, and i essentially said.
 
I didn't mean to hate on AMD (heck, I'm an AMD fanboy), just telling the guy what I've read. I shouldn't have made it sound like they're ALL made that way, and I also never meant to imply that AMD was being dirty for doing it. It makes sense from a business perspective.
 
As far as the Tri Core, they are (all) quads with a bad or really slow core disabled. I will repeat it in a different way, there is (no) true Tri Core, they are (all) a quad with a disabled core.
 
I noticed Phenom has 9500 and 9550 and same speed but 40-50 bucks more and I am curious whats the difference?
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As said before, the "xx00" series had a TLB bug that could cause a system lockup *in extremely rare circumstances* (the bug was fixed in the new B3 stepping, or "xx50" series CPUs) . The fix for it can reduce performance up to 20%, but I've never heard of the error being reproduced on a desktop, and mainly affects servers which need 100% reliability, stability and whatnot under constant heavy load.

As I said, the "xx50" series Phenoms have the bug fixed, along with some other (minor?) architectural improvements - the "xx00" series were pretty much flops, but if having a quad makes you feel high it's still a decent performer if you don't have the cash for anything better - the TLB bug probably won't even affect you, and even if/when it does it's rare.
 
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