Er, how do you chop a native quadcore in half?

The higher-clocked Athlon64 X2's have been shown to do better than the currently available lower-clocked Phenoms in many instances.

The clock-for-clock comparison isn't really accurate you can buy a higher clocked K8 for a comparable/lower price than a much lower-clocked Phenom.

The real rub for AMD is that the newer generation arch is slower in many instances than the mature higher-clocked old stuff. Kinda like the P3/early P4 Willamette problem Intel had many years ago. But unlike that problem in that AMD has been stuck at 2.5 Ghz and below on Phenom for the better part of a year.

Athlon X2 vs Phenom X2 theoretically phenoms are faster up to 30% due to L3 and much better HT though not tested in actual yet.

Waiting to see the actual bench... ^_^

Great, new dual cores slower than the old dual cores, and probably much poorer overclockers.

Will this be available for us poor S939 users?

If they really exist, I don't see much sense in AMD releasing them. Their X3s barely keep up with Intel's dual-cores. As some already suggested and if these really exist, they must be Phenom dies, with 2 ruined cores and AMD is trying to make some money out of them.

I bet these are from the "crap bin". they weren't good for X3.
By now the bin with the chips that were not bad enough to melt them is full and they can ship in quantitys.
I'll wait until next year for the 45nm X4

I wonder how these are clock-for-clock against K8's.

Benchmark please.

When i started reading this bit of news it was with an Arnold Schwartz impersonation.

:o}