AMD’s triple-core Phenom chips are now shipping |
As promised back in September, AMD announced on Thursday that it has started shipping its new Phenom processors with triple cores. These processors are the first on the market that use 3 cores on a single silicon die instead of the more traditional 2 or 4 core chips.
The design of the Phenom X3 8400 (2.1GHz) and Phenom X3 8600 (2.3GHZ) chips are essential the same as AMD’s quad cores with one of the cores removed. This configuration allows for new pricing of the chips in between dual cores and quad cores, where rival Intel does not currently have a competitive product.




Intel made an announcement on Sunday that they’ve decided to give a new family of small processor chips the official name “Atom”. The Atom family of processors will be low-power chips targeting mobile devices that access the internet as well as lower-end, “Internet-centric” mobile computers. The first two chips to be branded with the Atom were previously code-named Silverthorne and Diamondville.