AMD reveals more details on tri-core chip

Yesterday, we reported that AMD was looking to the currently non-existent three-core CPU market as both a potential point of differentiation from the competition and a way to offload any quad-core chips that happen to roll off of the assembly line with only three cores in tact. Well, it looks like the company has decided to make things official, with a Phenom-branded, three-core CPU slated for the first quarter of next year. While the clock speed of the chip is currently unknown, AMD has revealed the CPU's basic architecture and it looks like the part will sport 2MB of shared L3 cache and will support socket AM2+ motherboards. AMD expects this to be "the world's first PC processor to integrate three computational cores on a single die of silicon" and notes that the new chip is "a response to demand for increased performance delivered by multi-core processors when running state-of-the-art applications." Uh huh.

For more on the tri-core chip:
- see this press release
- and this Ars Technica article