Posted by Jason Dunn in "Digital Home Articles & Resources" @ 04:58 PM
"Today AMD is releasing its first triple-core processors to the retail market after initially announcing them on the eve of IDF Fall 2007 in an attempt to steal away some of the limelight from Intel’s twice yearly shindig. Don’t be fooled though, these aren’t the first ever triple-core processors AMD has released, we’d spotted several Mesh machines using triple-core Phenom 8400 and 8600 processors long before AMD officially announced them late last month. Because of the release timeframe, they were of course based on the older B2 stepping but, unlike today’s launch, those processors were limited to system builders only. This was probably due to the fact that the B2 stepping chips weren’t exactly renowned for overclocking and shipping with relatively cheap systems would be a way to shift the old stock as quick as possible."Man, it's rough being an AMD fan right now - they really dropped the ball in terms of being able to keep up with Intel's Core 2 series of processors. This article runs through a detailed benchmark of the three-core Phenom processor, but in the end the result is about what you'd expect: it's not really worth if. If you've got an AMD board, it's better to go with one of the quad-core versions of the Phenom processor, or even the two-core 6000+ Black Edition CPU (which is what I did).