Odd numbers of cores, now that'll upset a few licensing models, still if IBM can do it why not AMD. But don't be too surprised when you find that you land up paying for 4 cores worth of licenses.

Home market only, I suspect, and who'll be the first to hack the other core for a 3.5 core CPU. ;-)

I wonder if this will be good enough to put it back on the top of the list above intell again

Um... reread the article. These are four-core chips.

.....Are you kidding? Did you just miss the last paragraphs mentioning tricores, or did you think that you could trick us into believing it doesn't exist?

@What's a core amongst friends

You can sure as heck bet a good chunk of the overclocking community will make short work of getting that fourth core to do what they want :) 3.75 maybe. Perhaps thats the future of overclocking. Not how fast your clock speeds go, but how many failed cores you can recover.

It could be, for a while at least, if they can get both the X4 9500 & X4 9600 prices under that of the Intel Q6600 (circa. £185). No doubt, Intel will counter with a price drop for the Q6600, anyway. I think the X2 6400 is about £160 at the moment; this'd be a price point for AMD to intro the 9500, to get my AM2 boards rapidly upgraded to quad cores. Maybe the 9600 at a similar price to the Q6600 is at present? I'd probably go straight for the 9600 if the price difference isn't too big (unlike with the X2 6000 vs. X2 6400 at nearly 50% more, at present). Though, the X2 6400 intro'ed at about £220, if I remember correctly. If this price, or higher, is held for the new 9600 part, then it'd certainly slow my multiple purchase.

thanks EL i get it now because i am still i big fan of AMD hope this will mean that my next upgrade will do well as i hope it will.

Maybe? Could be? Should be? It probably won't be? If AMD would just get it together and make product(s) that blows "The Other Chip-Making Guy" out of the sky will is when the comparisons can stop. I'm tired of it all... Come on AMD and get it together for ONCE will you?