Is AMD Planning On Triple-Core Processors?

According to The Inq, AMD is readying three-core processors, which immediately prompts the question of.. why? The Inq insists this is not a rumor but solid “fact”, but three-core CPUs just doesn’t seem to make much sense. What I could see resulting from this is bad yields and poor efficiency. Quad-Cores have four cores that are interconnected… in a square pattern, obviously. This allows fast information sharing and cache swapping, but how do you accomplish this with three cores instead of four? Start a pyramid?

I’ll hold all of my thoughts back until the performance of these are actually seen, but the reason behind this cannot be that great. AMD should have skipped right to Quin-Cores and actually had a chance to beat Intel’s own processors. If these actually see the light of day, I will be amazed. Somehow, I am still quite curious to see how these would overclock…

On the technical side, this is pretty trivial to do: three to core four is just a fuse to blow. What it gets you is a whole lot of choices. Remember the smooth run of SKUs, that was the beginning. If your clocks are thermally constrained, having three instead of four cores gives you a bin or two of speed. Given how few games use a second core fully, this might be a real win.

Source: The Inquirer