14 DAY TRIAL // Chip manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices will release its upcoming tri-core offerings anytime now. Company officials claimed last month that AMD will treat the upcoming Phenom 8000 processors and low-power chip based on the Phenom processor as top priorities for the first quarter of 2008.
Chinese press agency published a report claiming that the chip manufacturer will release its tri-core offerings in the Toliman family in early March. The bad news is that the processors will be shipped to OEMs only, so you'd better wave goodbye at the idea of a nice and inexpensive upgrade. According to the same sources, AMD will not ship boxed (retail) version of the Phenom 8000 for some time. The restriction includes the 8000-based Phenom 8400 running at 2.3GHz and the 8600 running at 2.3 GHz.
The above-mentioned processors will be built on the B2 silicon stepping, which would make them subject to the Transitional Lookaside Buffer erratum bug that crippled the Phenom and the Opteron processors since they were officially launched. The processors will have to be clocked down by 15 percent in order to avoid the bug.
Despite the bug being present in the B2 stepping, OEM vendors are still interested in the chips, mostly because they come at just the right price. Gateway, HP and other PC vendors are currently selling B2 versions of the Phenom 8000 chips because the official tray price for 1000-unit quantities is way below the $190. The Phenom 9500 quad-core chips sell for $209 in 1,000-unit trays, yet they can be purchased from online retailers such as NewEgg for just $190. Given the fact that the Phenom 8000 will be modestly priced, they will tend to replace AMD's fastest dual-core chip, the 3.2GHz Athlon 64 X2 6400+, that currently sells for $160.
The upcoming revision of the chip, the B3 silicon stepping will bring fixed Phenom desktop processors as well as the long-awaited Opteron server chips. However, the B3 will kick in later, in the second quarter of the year, should everything go as scheduled.