The great chip shop dichotomy
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?