I can't cope with the number 3, it's too uncomfortable.

Pity they weren't able to do this with the Athlon line .... 3 core Athlon ... tri-Athlon. Geddit?

TAXI!

Humour ... it's a lost art I tell you ...

The art is apparently not completely lost, LOL. Seriouly, though this is the big flag of defeat being waived by AMD. Not only do they have enough bad yield chips from quads to justify supplying an entire new line of crappy CPUs, but they're planing on this continuing thru 45nm?!?! What is their development team thinking? FIX THE PROBLEM THAT'S CAUSING THE APPARENTLY ATROCIOUS YEILDS. Don't try and pawn your broken crap on consumers.

I can't wait till carmakers start selling 4 and 6 cylinder engines with a dead cylinder as 3 and 5 cylinder models. I really hope that Intel lines up a nice ad campaign poking fun at this tragic path AMD is on. When people were telling them make lemonade from lemons 6 months ago this is not what they had in mind as the solution...

But "down-grading" chips has always been the way :

Selling chips at a lower clock speed because some on the batch had failed the speed tests.

Taking CPU with failed onboard maths coprocessesors and selling them as non maths coprocessor components.

I could go on. but.......

I agree that AMD really should investigate the failures but why not let them sell off chips that are essentially sound - it could well reduce the unit costs as they will be writing off less on each production run.

Gonna buy me a 3GHz three dollar bill.

Wouldn't it be interesting to find out how many Core 2 Duo CPUs are failed Quad parts?

I'm betting at least a fair amount... some probably have 3 cores that COULD function but Intel choose not to offer such an SKU. Perhaps it's not the case at all, but would be interested in finding out...

No improvements will ever yield 100% though, so what's the point in selling htem as dual cores if you can flog them for a little more as a tri-core? It's only a bit of packaging etc. at the end of the day, it's not like they've developed a process specifically for it - they already test each core on a chip anyway.

..is that those chips are downgraded to existing production part lines. i.e. a P4 that gets downgraded to a Celeron or a Conroe that gets knocked down from an E6700 2.6Ghz to say an entry level E2140 1.6Ghz. AMD is creating an entirely new line of unplanned chips based on duds.

This is a huge set back in terms of marketing and PR. Everyone who pays attention to the CPU market (read OEMs, since Dell and the like are the real customers here) knows this move is 100% because AMD is having terrible fab problems with 65nm, and you're going to have to convince those people (again OEMs) that these tri's can be sold to Joe Sixpack. Can they take garbage and polish it shiny enough to fool the laymen? Only time will tell, but I'm not going to be holding my breath.

They could downgrade the "tricores" to dualies and probably make just as much money, even though they'd sell at lower prices, simply because you don't have to spend the money to basically create a new niche market in such a short time frame.

They're not going to make good margins on these chips, heck I'd be sursprised if they break even after all the advertising and sales pitches that are going to have to be made just to get OEMs to buy in and then convince Joe sixpack to buy one, and if Intel jumps into the marketing fray with ads bashing these gimped quads, then they're really going to be loosing money. If I was Intel's marketing department, I'd be pretty damn excited about rubbing AMD's face deeper in the mud over th next 4-6 months.

I can see what AMD are doing here they are going to play a short game of leap frog in order to show that they are different and do not copy everything Intel does. I anticipate a 6 core on the horizon, perhaps they aim to get that out before Intels 8 quad. Then it may go 12 core AMD 16 core Intel, after that point the game will end. And by that point we will probably be on 8nm anyway.

I worked out (while waiting for Eclipse to load one day) that I need exactly 3 cores for developing Java apps. If these things are only €20 more than an dualie, then I would buy one, but if they are only €20 cheaper than a quad then I would go without peanut butter for a week or two.

It's possible that only 3 cores could save the need to buy a noisier fan and bigger PSU, and I'm a very noise and price sensitive kinda guy. I'm running a 2200+ Sempron at the moment, even though I could afford a Barton at the time I bought it.

I'm certainly in favour, although I suspect you won't find many outside the homebuild market as the supply could dry up in an instant when AMD get their yields up to scratch.