AMD announces triple core CPUs

Posted at: 1:00am 18th September 2007 by Alex Watson

Three is the magic number for AMD as it reveals plans for a three-core CPU

Three is apparently the magic number – it’s also a crowd, the trinity, a mobile phone company and the charm – but it’s not been a number particularly associated with computer hardware, with dual graphics and quad-core CPUs being the norm.

Until now that is.

AMD has confirmed the recent rumours, announcing today that it plans to produce triple-core processors. They won’t be available until the first quarter of 2008, and AMD wouldn’t be drawn on clock speeds or price. They will be Phenom models, and the company confirmed they will be made using the same design and on the same production lines as quad-core Phenoms, so will be 65nm chips.

The slides AMD provided with the press release announcement show a CPU with three cores, each with 512KB of L2 cache, along with a shared pool of 2MB L3 cache. The chip interfaces with DDR2-800 memory, and according to the roadmap AMD supplied us with, uses HyperTransport 3.0 and Socket AM2+ packaging. As AMD claims, this corresponds with what we know so far about quad-core Phenom chips.

In the conference call at which the announcement was made, AMD was keen to remind the listening journalists that it was the only company able to offer a triple core CPU, a non-too subtle dig at the fact that Intel’s current quad-core chips essentially comprise two dual-core dies sandwiched together. As Phenom is a native quad-core design, offering a triple-core version is fairly simple; you just turn off one of the cores – or alternatively, you’re able to sell chips with one core that doesn’t work. This is the method ATi and Nvidia use to create the head-spinning number of variants of their GPUs, disabling 'quads' of shader processors to create GPUs like the 8800 GTS from the top-of-the-range GTX and Ultra. Perhaps AMD is learning from its acquisition of ATi.

In addition to claiming a triple-core chip is customer centric innovation and perfect for megatasking, AMD’s spokesmen did actually make some interesting points, particularly about gaming. Many PC games are either ported from the Xbox 360, or released simultaneously on both systems, and as the Xbox 360 uses a triple-core CPU AMD is perhaps hoping its new triple-core CPUs will find favour with gamers.

AMD was also keen to stress that its quad-core Phenom CPUs, using the Agena and Agena FX core are still planned for a late 2007 release.