I hear that these are in fact 4 core chips with 2 defunct cores turned off.

So effectively a Phenom X4^h3^h2

Is this down to yield being poor? or is this AMD trying to get rid of old 65nm parts before they introduce 4 core 45nm chips?

Either way, I think this shows how the chip manufactures are now serving the general PC user as a secondary concern.

It's pretty easy to see by looking at the metrics that the general public would get more benefit from a purpose designed higher speed 2 core chip (e.g. the now somewhat dated Core 2 Duo).

Meanwhile, the chip giants seem intent on forcing reduced cache multi core server parts at us whilst sidestepping questions about who really needs 8 concurrently executing threads.

Up until now, the majority of people buying new chips that are faster than their previous system. Soon though, Core 2 Duo users running at >3Ghz are going to be looking for a new I7 system and finding that they will have to pay upwards of 1k$ for the CPU just to get processor parity for single or dual threaded operation.

Will you pay for that?

My family is pretty much split down the line when it comes to what powers it with the processor..mine is a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Black Edition whilst my parents is a Celeron Dual Core (Core 2 chip, but with lower cache and the Celeron name"

I will be upgrading to a phenom at some stage next year, So i will be very interested to see how this pans out.

AMD need something to get back into the market.

Face it, everyone is happilly saving themselves into a recession, not many people are spalshing out on killer home systems, so having a budget part that still offers excellent perfromance for 95% of home users is a good thing, and if it uses up otherwise defunct chips then it saves money for AMD as well. If I was AMD, my worry would be that this may take sales from the newer CPUs as cash-strapped punters look for a bargain option