Similar products? Does Intel want tri-cores?

Tricore is a fantastic idea. Quad core is a complete overkill for many users. Gaming hasn't really taken advantage of multi-core designs in my honest opinion at this point. If AMD can make more money from this while offering a competitive product against Intel's dual-core with no or little price difference, I believe it will be a success.

I always thought about upgrading to quad core but found myself wondering what the heck I am doing with 4 cores except for saying i have a quadcore proc. With the intro of X3, I can definitely bite on that.

Well, it's official:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/33895/118/

Probably just depends if you can easily disable the bad core on the second chip. Might not be worth the effort for Intel to spend the time improving a dual core to a 2+1 setup for the gain in price. Intel would have one functional chip without doing anything, AMD have nothing, so much more to gain. But I have seen benches of dual processor systems with a single and a dual core processor, so I see no reason why they cannot do it, just they are not choosing to do it.

moreso than anything else, this really is a smart business choice in terms of minimizing losses associated w/ high-end manufacturing processes... amd has nearly always tried to present itself as a "better value" alternative to intel, so this certainly plays into that

Yeah I'm not sure there's much point. Q6600 just keeps getting cheaper. If AMD adds a tri-core to their lineup, Intel will just bring in some more price cuts or release a Q6400 or some such.

This is win-win for everyone. AMD saves a bunch of chips from the trash heap and I can get a cheap multi-core processor.

Instead of the usual 'doubling' strategy they're taking this one step at the time? Interesting...

FWIW there's been a thread going in the forums on this topic, since Saturday:
http://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=53485

I'd buy one. But only if they offer a big savings over quad core, or have a much lower thermal envelope.

But makes sense for AMD to do this. Intel did this with the Pentium/Celeron, so why not?

Makes sense. Think 8800GTS.

Hey, whatever helps them achieve a good price/performance point. 25% less heavily threaded performance for 25% less $, while still maintaining good single thread performance? that's just fine. And if it helps keep the price of 4 core procs low, even better.