AMD has had a busy morning... and fired us three press releases:

"AMD Launches World's First x86 Triple Core Processors"

Yes folks, the tripe core Phenoms are officially launched. These are quad core dies where one core is disabled due to being defective and/or due to wanting to sell a three core sku. AMD says that when these chips are paired with an AMD 780 series chipset, they will improve 3D gaming and HD multimedia experience for their users. AMD did manage to launch them in Q1 - albeit with only three days left in the quarter :-)

"AMD Extends Energy Efficient Processing Leadership with World's First 65W Quad-Core Desktop Processor"

The AMD  Phenom X4 9100e processor has a 65W TDP, allowing for more energy efficient quad core computing. The quad core processor will help with compute-intensive tasks such as h.264 decoding as well as other HD playback and encoding applications. While the press release did not say what speed the 9100e will run at, a quick google search suggests that it runs at 1.8GHz (9x200) with a 1.12Vcore. As more heavily multi-threaded software becomes mainstream, the quad cores will start to pull ahead on the performance curve.

"Four new AMD Phenom(tm) X4 processors pair with AMD enthusiast platform to propel the Ultimate Visual Experience"

Looks like AMD is confident in the B3 stepping of Phenoms; today it announced the immediate availability of four new X4 Phenoms - and is heavily pushing the "Spider Platform" - combining a Phenom CPU with a AMD 790 chipset with a Radeon 3800 series GPU.

$235 AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition - unlocked multipliers are featured in this beastie, with a 2.5GHz clock speed. This is the current top-end processor from AMD, I guess we will have to wait for a 9950 to be announced at a later date.

$215 AMD Phenom X4 9750 - 2.4GHz of quad core goodness, but with locked multipliers.

$215 AMD Phenom X4 9650 - 2.3GHz quad core processor.

$209 AMD Phenom X4 9550 - 2.2GHz quad core processor.

(prices in OEM quantities, as of April 7th, taken from AMD press site)

The pricing is quite interesting - the old Phenom 9500 is priced at $209, so the $209 price on the 9550 with the B3 fix indicates that the 9500 is not long for this world. The old 9600 makes the point even more strongly with its $251 price tag, making it more expensive than the bug fixed 9550 by $36 - no one will buy a buggy chip that costs more than a fixed one!

Looking at the other prices, it becomes pretty obvious that AMD is expecting to ramp to higher clock rates sometime in May, as the 2.3/2.4 GHz parts are priced the same, spelling doom for the 2.3GHz part.