AMD Quells Phenom X4 960T Release Rumors

[Rob Williams]

For about the past month, AMD's rumored Phenom X4 960T chip has been floating around the Web with pictures, some benchmarks, and even results of core unlocking (that is, to turn the quad-core into a six-core). Along with AMD's launch of new Athlon II models yesterday, many were expecting to see at least mention of the X4 960T, but a post-launch e-mail from AMD aims to put rumors to to rest.

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You can read the rest of our post here.

 

[madmat]

I'm calling shens. There's no way that those 6 core chips are all 100% functional and at the cost of each wafer they make I can't see AMD shrugging their collective shoulders, saying "Oh well" and chucking them into a shredder. Nope.

I'll put dollars to doughnuts that once we start seeing a good supply of 6 core chips in more flavors hitting the shelves it'll be a matter of time (and most likely a short time at that) before the bad chips start hitting shelves in a neutered package.

 

[Rob Williams]

I'm calling shens. There's no way that those 6 core chips are all 100% functional and at the cost of each wafer they make I can't see AMD shrugging their collective shoulders, saying "Oh well" and chucking them into a shredder. Nope.

Of course that's not what's happening. I have little doubt that AMD right now has a good stockpile of less-than-perfect six-core chips... but why release them now? As I mentioned in the post, there's little point to it. The company just released its true six-core processors weeks ago, so it doesn't want to go and bastardize sales there by introducing core unlockable chips like the 960T... it just wouldn't make sense.

The technology in these chips isn't changing for a while, so by the time AMD's sales for its six-core chips have slowed, I'm sure that we'll be seeing an onslaught of chips like the 960T hit the market. That's just unlikely to happen until after the summer.

 

[madmat]

I agree, it won't happen any time soon. But as we both agree, it will be happening which is contradictory to what the AMD rep is saying.

 

[Rob Williams]

The AMD rep himself likely doesn't even know for certain, and I'm sure he wouldn't even deny that something like the 960T is en route... it just might not be called the 960T ;-)

 

[Kougar]

What's not to say they aren't already selling them as Phenom X4s? It's not like they are different CPUs, just whack off two cores, some cache, and sell it as current model X4s. People wouldn't ever know unless someone managed to get lucky nosing around, but even then most people couldn't take advantage of it. It would fix the core unlocking problem easily.

 

[madmat]

The 1090T and 1055T have 6mb cache on the L3, no? If they lost 1/3 the core physically, they'd have to cut the L3 behind the 2 dead cores along with it. They'd be forced to use them as Athlon II X4 CPUs which would be a bigger loss than locking 2 cores and selling them as higher end PII X4 procs.

 

[Kougar]

The L3 cache is a single (separate) large pool, only the L2 cache is built directly to the core. The X6 has the same 6MB L3 cache as the X4 Phenom, and each core has the same 512KB L2 built in.

So AMD wouldn't be losing anything extra to package these chips under ANY other Phenom brand if they need to disable a core or two... and it would prevent lost sales from people buying known disabled X4 960Ts instead of a full X6.