AMD's triple-core Phenom II X3 goes quad-core via BIOS hack
By Darren Murph 
posted Feb 27th 2009 6:35AM
posted Feb 27th 2009 6:35AM
[Via Slashgear]
posted Feb 27th 2009 6:35AM
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
First? Who doesn't like a little free extra power for your aging computer...
A little extra power for your just-purchased CPU since only the recently made CPUs are affected. Seems like a very small amount of those.
Don't hope to activate 4-th core. Buy a quad-core if you need it.
'First'
How are you not low ranked yet?
Biggest fail of the day. Wow.
Pretty sweet if you have one. Reminds me of the old GPU days, unlocking pixel pipelines
Hell yeah. ATI 9700 was awesome like that.
It only works on one batch of CPU's aparently and new bioses will exclude this. Plus its dangerous to run a cpu core that has been disabled due to either not being upto spec, or supply and demand, you wont know either till thers a problem.
Yeah, this probably isn't safe. The cores are disabled partly for marketing purposes, but partly because they couldn't keep their yields of quad cores up. I'm not sure why you would want to run a core that might have been faulty. Then again, they might have gotten their yields up with Phenom II so these might actually all be fine.
"for pricing reasons" is probably bunk. I have an x2 7750, which is actually a phenom with 2 cores disabled. Even with the two cores I have left, one overclocks significantly better than the other. Even money says the two disabled cores are even less reliable.
I'm not saying no decent cores got disabled, but this isn't like like the old GPU days.
Sorry, I'd much rather pay a little more for four cores that work.
NEXT
i thought that the x3's where mostly X4's where one of the cores weren't quite up to scratch, sure there will be some that are fine, but its far from a certainty, expect instability if you go down this road.
This could be dangerous, as the 4th core in many of these processors have defectives. AMD sells triple core processors to increase their yields, as any quad core processor in which one core fails in testing can be sold as a triple core processor.
Yeah, they do this with the PS3's Cell processor.
Yep, a ps3 has an Ocho core (8) clocked at 3.6ghz per core, but sony turns 1 off to increase yield, and reserves one for the system monitor (AKA Hypervisor) so in reality it is still a kick a-- 6 core cell processor
Agreed, this is a bad idea. Some processors may be marked Triple while the fourth core is in a usable state, but MANY of these triple processors were quads that had one core fail. Instead of throwing the chip away, AMD dropped the price and called it a triple. I suppose it can't hurt to try it out, but I wouldn't run it like that all the time unless you like having your computer crash often.
These Phenoms are quad-core processors, but their fourth cores are found to be defective or otherwise not perfectly functional. It's not a good idea to run that core. It's disabled for a reason. There's no reason they would sell a pristine quad-core processor for a lower price as triple-core.
who said? amd?
Actually, they could, since all the processors on a wafer are marked as X3 if only one of them shows a defective core. This has been done for ever with cache memory (Celeron, Sempron), and those were good ol' days when you could unlock 256KB of L2 cache by just using a pencil. :)
hum actually ... you are dead wrong. Noone throws away a whole wafer for one defective core anymore. However, the tests are automated and there are errors. So it is indeed possible to have a perfectly functioning core marked as defective. Also just because a core does not perform up to AMD's standards does not mean that you won't be able to boot windows on it or run applications. The problem might only show up under certain condition and most people do not look for hardware problems when their software crashes. But it is actually a pretty dumb idea to unlock a core that the manufacturer says is bad. Do you really think AMD would be marking good cores as bad ones and loose both money and market share? After all saying that you are selling a 3 core CPU when your competitor is selling a 4 core one is not something that they would choose to do if they really didn't have to.
Hah! I remember the pencil trick. It eventually wore out my old processor but not for a good 3 years or so.
Intel has sold processors for years below their actually capability to safely run.
Throttle some back and sell them cheaper. Sell the unthrottled to enthusiast.
Let's throw in some made up numbers to illustrate this thought.
Imagine 20% of AMD buyers are high-end buyers, 60% are mid-end and the remaining 20% bottom-end.
Now imagine that 40% of the yield is of higher end processors.
What would AMD do? Lower the price of the higher end processors so that more people buy it, throw half the higher end processors away or rebrand them as mid-end and make more money from the high end? So you have 20% of all processors, or 1/3 of all mid-end processors, coming from the high-end line, rebranded. The remaining are defective cores. You can bet the high end processors should cost less to buy but are sold higher since there are people who pay for it, but on the other hand the mid to low-end processors end up cheaper because of this.
Then again, I could be "dead wrong".
Stupid AMD why would you add a 4th core to a triple core CPU and then lock it how stupid can this company be. So you pay for a triple core and they have to pay manufacturing cost for a quad core CPU. Now I have said this get ready and let the AMD fanboys mark me down!
You sir are a fool.
How is repurposing a faulty quad-core a bad thing? The triple core CPU's are damn good value :)
I had one of the original Phenom X3's and it was a fantastic processor :D
THERE AREN'T ANY LEFT
typed from my AMD 5000+ XP compy. Works just fine, software overclocked to 3.0 with no overvoltaging.
*shrug* saved me about $100 when I built my computer (out of a total cost of $250 bought components), between the lower cost motherboard and lower cost processor, and that's all I really care about
They sell customers Defective Quad core CPU's Seriously this company has no life.
"has no life" lmfao
Im no AMD fanboy (quite the opposite actually) but
THAT'S WHY ITS A TRIPLE CORE AND NOT A QUAD CORE
It's no different from when Intel were selling DXs and SXs.
Intel does the same thing. There is no difference between CPU's of the same type that sell at different $/MHz. They test CPU's to see what speed they are stable at and sell in that price range accordingly.
That's why overclocking works.
uhm yeah it it is ... by about 20 years.
Not always all 4 cores can do that speed, then slowest they disable and sell like X3... But I don't see a reason why would do this with PII because it can go on much higher clocks... btw AMD CPUs can overclock each core individualy, so unlock forth core but set lower clock speed :)
Dude. Decaf.
The fastest way known to man of turning your motherboard into a blast-shaped stencil :D
Don't you need special coding for tri-core type processors? Most dev's are working on the 2 and 4 configurations, i don't see any serious software house spending R&D on this
The OS can do some load balancing.
No. Multithreaded apps will take advantage of as many CPUs or cores as the OS allows.
That actually highly depends on the application and the programmer behind it.
No it does not. An app is typically either single threaded or multithreaded. If multithreaded, where the thread count exceed the core count, any additional cores are helpful.
Yes it does... as a full time developer, I know this. If you create an application that spawns one thread to perform a list of tasks, and only one thread, the existence of 4 vs 3 cores will not make a difference.
If you spawn off 1000 threads, yes. It will make a difference. That's what I was talking about. It REALLY depends on the program and the programmer.
Simply having a multi-threaded application (which most of them are nowadays with UI taking a thread of its own) you will not see a dramatic improvement.
@Andir3.0, how many apps do you know of that use exactly 2 OR exactly 4 threads? My multithreaded apps are just that MULTI-threaded. Not dual-threaded...
For any one considering this, is SO unlikely to work reliably do not bother. Don't buy a 3x with your fingers crossed!
well damn. now thats interesting.
ahh i remember my first beer...
R u a lolcat?
lolomgwtf!!!
1) Most chip manufacturers will follow this process of selling "defective" parts as lower sku's. I see nothing wrong with it. They have an intended part they try to manufacture, but the produced piece doesn't meet that specification. They determine this through testing...Parts that operate well in a certain range get sold in that range. In most cases they will deactivate and block the defective component from use and bam you've now made back some of the cost of producing That is why you have the Black Edition AMD processors and the Extreme Edition Intel processors. These processors demolished the tests they were run through and were determined to be high grade parts. This also explains why they are so much more expensive. (To Alex: Never realized that companies had lives to begin with...)
2) Intel has been doing this far longer than AMD. Celeron and Sempron procoessors are like this as well. They were perfectly fine in terms of processor capability, but a portion of the cache did not work right. So they "sever" the bad cache using a laser and now you have another product line. This is all about increasing yields and having less waste.
3) Video Card manufacturers do the same thing. A GTX 280 that couldn't quite run at GTX 280 specs become the GTX 260. This is by no means a bad thing. The parts work just fine at their advertised spec...but as mentioned earlier, this allows for overclocking and all that fun stuff.
4) Acme: Programmers don't program for a set number of cores...They program their applications with threads which can be thought of as mini processes within a program. These threads are then scheduled on the processor through the OS. This is actually one of the OS's core responsibilities. On Windows, you can actually manipulate this to some extent. In task manager, with a multi-core processor if you right click, you can set the relative priority of a process which will have the OS give your processor time, while affinity will make your OS try to schedule the process on a specific core. If you have more cores, you can process more threads at once. If you are trying to run 4 threads on a 3 core processor, the threads will run fine, albeit a bit slower. You could run those 4 threads on a single core processor and the threads will run fine as well... If you want more info on this do some research on parallel programming or "parallelism"
LOL CATZ LOLUTZ ROLF LOLA'S RUN
so, just because a company uses all possible resources, creating little waste, and attempts to be cost effective with its products, you conclude that is sucks the penis of a goat...
you, my friend are the one who sucks donkey dick
If we shut down AMD, your precious intel CEOs and buisnessmen will have a monopoly, and can charge as much as they what, for what ever crap they produce. you should be thanking AMD and their cost effective marketing, becaus competition is what keeps money in your pocket.
P.S.
not a AMD Fanboy
EVGA 790i FTW PWM
Intel Q6600 @3.2ghz
EVGA 9600GTX video card (waiting to buy 2 others for SLi)
4gb ddr3 2000mhz SLi
Can Endgadget please stop linking to other blogs which then link to other to other blogs. How about take some time and effort and trace down the original story and place of origin like in this one being Toms Hardware and link directly to that. Not try to raise click threws to people who did nothing but posted up a link to begin with.
To everyone that complains, why not? i mean you spent the money on the proc get the most out of it, if it dies just get another. Its not that serious , chances are by now you could get something more decent from AMD anyways.
Side note, its probably not worth buying a whole new mobo just to unlock the core when you could get a cheap core2quad intel.