B3 stepping appears to be a "GO"
Digitimes reports that AMD plans to launch B3 stepping Phenom processors within the next two weeks.
- Phenom 9850 @ 2.5GHz
- Phenom 9750 @ 2.4GHz
- Phenom 9650 @ 2.3GHz
- Phenom 9550 @ 2.2GHz
- Phenom 9150 @ ???GHz
Supposedly AMD plans on bringing out higher speed versions in Q3.
Apparently we will also have B3 stepping triple core Phenoms launching in late April, with a 65W TDP.
- Phenom 8750 @ 2.4GHz
- Phenom 8650 @ 2.3GHz
- Phenom 8450 @ ???GHz
AMD will also apparently launch some dual core parts.
- Athlon 64 X2 5800+
- Athlon X2 5600+ Black Edition
- Athlon X2 4600+
And Phenom-based dual core parts by end of Q2:
Orders will stop being taken for some dual core Athlon's
- Athlon 64 X2 6400+
- Athlon 64 X2 6000+
- Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (89W version)
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It gives them a better foothold to run 3 cores and compete at a lower pricepoint against the E6850 and E6750 instead of selling dual core parts that either barely match or get stomped out. The point of the game is sales afterall, not playing fair and hoping the consumer understands.
Given the design of the chip they should be able to disable cores in the factory seeing as they have a dedicated quad core part and they're not dealing with 2 dual core chips linked over a high speed bus like Intel is dealing with right now. (Funny enough they're working around the clock on a single chip solution finally and admitting the problems encountered with just slapping down an extra pair of cores on a chip)
The biggest thing they need to tackle in general though is their power consumption and their clock speeds, many people have been cranking up the speeds of the present chips but it's not enough because the average joe doesn't want to have to void the warranty on their chip to get better numbers.