Phenom II x3 gets extra core with BIOS hack

[StrangleHold]

No, I wouldn't think so. It isn't a question of working. It is a question of reliability. It would have been a 4 core if it had passed the tests. It didn't pass the tests.

What is this? A yes it is, no its not thing. Waste of my time. If you want to think that AMD yields are so bad that all of the X3 on the market have a bad core and some are not just supply and demand. You can believe what you want. And the word Work and Reliability in computers means the same thing. If its not reliable in my opinion it doesnt work.

 

[diduknowthat]

It's all about supply and demand. If AMD believes that they can make more money by selling tricore CPU's by disabling one core, then they will do it whether that last core is good or not. Plus, it costs a fraction of the price they sell the chips for to produce them.

 

[StrangleHold]

Right, both AMD and Intel have done it for years on the defective/demand side. People would be surprised if they knew how many Semprons were really Athlon 64 with disabled cache or single core Athlons that were really a Athlon X2 with a disabled core. They do it both for Defective core/cache and for the demand side, Intel/AMD/ATI/Nvidia. Chipsets and GPUs included. They all do it for both reasons.

 

[fmw]

And the word Work and Reliability in computers means the same thing. If its not reliable in my opinion it doesnt work.

Perhaps as you gain experience you will understand things better. Perhaps it has been true based on your experience. But in my 20 years of computer systems integration, I can tell you it simply isn't true.

 

[/\E]

I had heard that the X3 processors were the X4 processors with one faulty core. So I can't really see this working on all chips.

Apple did this with one of their iPod Nano models. It was costing them the same to have their manufacturer produce boards with 1GB of memory compared to boards with 2GB of memory. So Apple went with 2GB boards and disabled a GB in the software. I don't know which model, and I don't know if that's the right amounts. I just remember seeing an article about it somewhere.

 

[bengal85]

sounds kinda risky but it benefits the people that do it right

 

[StrangleHold]

Perhaps as you gain experience you will understand things better. Perhaps it has been true based on your experience. But in my 20 years of computer systems integration, I can tell you it simply isn't true.

I'll over look that, since you have no idea who I am. I ,ve been doing this just as long as you have claimed. If you think that just because it boots up, that means it works. Your far from experienced and should be in a different field. If you think they dont disable parts of CPU/Chipsets and GPUs just for demand, your far from experienced. They have done this for years just because of cost and demand, its not just done because of faulty chips.

Hell companies make full spec. chips knowing in advance that they are going to disable parts of it to fill lowerend demands. Like AMD/ATI will make a full run of 790FX chips. Some will be set as a 770, some 790X and some will be 790FX chips. Sure if some have faults they will be set as a lowerend chip, but so are fully working chips. Its really cheaper that way because you can use almost all of the run

Use common sense man, do you really think AMD yields are so bad that (all) of the X3 are faulty core chips. Because if so, they are hitting about a 40/60% fault to good rate.

This is really elementary and its been done for years. Sure the reason for the X3 was to use up the fault cores X4. But as demand grows there is no way to fill it on just faulty cores.