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images/news/amd.jpgHot on the heels of last week's quad-core Opteron (a.k.a., Barcelona) launch comes a rumor that AMD is planning to release a triple-core, down-market variant of the new four-core part. The idea would be to salvage a few of the quad-core parts that have something wrong with one of the cores, and to insert a third tier of products right in the middle between dual- and quad-core offerings.
You might think that a triple-core CPU would be a commercial oddity, but you'd be wrong. The brains of the Xbox 360 is a triple-core CPU designed by IBM, so there is precedent for it. And from a software perspective, there's nothing odd about it, either (aside from the actual number of cores, of course), so this rumor seems pretty plausible to me.
Ars Technica
You might think that a triple-core CPU would be a commercial oddity, but you'd be wrong. The brains of the Xbox 360 is a triple-core CPU designed by IBM, so there is precedent for it. And from a software perspective, there's nothing odd about it, either (aside from the actual number of cores, of course), so this rumor seems pretty plausible to me.
Ars Technica
