14 DAY TRIAL // Three core AMD processing units will soon become a reality as Advanced Micro Devices officially announced that the company will work to bring to its customers yet another product in order to close the performance gap between the dual core and the quad core architectures. This announcement comes after several days of wild speculations and the company now officially added the triple-core Phenom processors to their product roadmap for desktops.
According to the news site beyond3d the new Phenom processors that are now officially on the AMD roadmap will most likely be called Phenom X3 and they will be based on the quad core architecture that is already on the market in the form of the Opteron class of products. As AMD uses a native quad core architecture, the company can easily fuse off a single core and market the resulting product as a three-cored variant that is aimed at the middle market between the dual core and the quad core processors.
The Phenom X3 line of central processing units can be expected sometime during the first months of the next year, while the desktop version of the quad core processors will launch as scheduled in 2007. "With our advanced multi-core architecture, AMD is in a unique position to enable a wider range of premium desktop solutions, providing a smarter choice for customers and end users," said Greg White, vice president and general manager, Desktop Division, AMD. "This innovation is a direct result of our development of the industry's first true, native quad-core design, coupled with AMD's manufacturing flexibility, to create multi-core processors in two, three, and four computational core configurations on a single die of silicon. As a customer-centric company, AMD is committed to working with our OEMs to deliver compelling value propositions across their multi-core product families with capabilities that address their requirements and aspirations."
Just like the quad core models, the three-cored products will be based on the Direct Connect hardware architecture and they will come with an integrated memory controller, a feature that will enable them to offer greater performance when it comes to gaming and CPU intensive applications. A number of other technical innovations, like the AMD Balanced Smart Cache and the shared L3 cache memory, will also find their way into the new line of products and their role will be to increase the running performance of all multi-threaded enabled software applications.
Because operating systems and applications do not make assumptions related to the number of core present on a particular processing unit, AMD's three-cored design should have no problem working with all modern day applications and there will be no difference, apart from the performance gap, between the workload handling on a dual, three or quad core CPU. While the Phenom X3 CPUs will be released as desktop processors only, in the first phase, as they will be less energy consuming, it is very possible that they will also come in a mobile version later.
About the price tag that will come with the X3 version of the Phenoms there is no word just yet, but since we are talking about AMD, we can expect a competitive price that will attract more customers which are budget minded but also are looking for a powerful gaming platform.