Space_Monkey :
Sooo let me get this straight. AMD puts out a faulty quadcore, that is supposed to be "True Quad". They put out a half-assed fix for it. Then they get around to throwing out the new B3, which is not a new chip, it just fixes what should have been fixed before release. and then after all that they have left over faulty chips, so instead of tossing them they disable the faulty core and sell the faulty chips as a cheaper(hopefully) and newer chip? I'm really starting to lose faith in AMD if this is right. Please somebody tell me that i'm wrong here.
All CPU's have errata. The TLB errata is supposedly rarely encountered, but since B3 was on the way, it hurt sales of B2 stepping. Intel has had just as many "faulty" cores, such faults don't change performance since they are rarely encountered in either AMD or Intel CPU's.
Disabling one core rather than throwing away the whole CPU is akin to what both AMD and Intel have done with cache for many years. Where did you think the AMD Semprons and Intel Celerons came from? The reason that Intel has not released triple cores is that they don't have native quad core. True that native quad core isn't as important if not implemented well. Elegance cannot trump peformance. Equivalent Phenoms lose slightly to Q6600 at stock, and does not overclock as well.
That said, the Phenom 9850 looks to be a great budget quad with close to Intel performance for less. It has a better upgrade path than an Intel build today because Deneb is "only" 9 months away at most. With a new Intel build today, you'll need a new motherboard for Nehalem. It all depends on how often you want to upgrade.
With AMD there are two upgrade choices:
If you have one of the bios supporting AM2 690G boards (i.e. ASUS, my wife has one), you can just slap in a Phenom for now, then wait to see how Deneb pans out to decide whether to go AMD's next socket with Deneb, or Intel's next socket with Nehalem. If one is certain they want Deneb in December, then a 780G, 770 or 790 board for a Phenom 9850 is a good deal, because Deneb will support AM2+ as well as AM3 arriving by February 2009. The big difference between AM2+ and AM3 is supposed to be DDR3.
Phenom's not all that bad. People on the Intel side hate to have Prescott brought up (because it's "old") but when they accuse AMD fans of cherrypicking benchies where Phenom either beats a Q6600 or gets to within reasonable framerates or encoding time of a Q6600, they attack what they relied upon during the days of Prescott, when Intel fans (myself included at the time -- I had two Northwoods) pointed out that Netburst was better in encoding then Athlon 64's, and some Pentium D's could hold their own vs. X2's in a very few benchmarks.
And so it goes....
My big question with Phenom B3 is that it didn't come out when I last upgraded, so I was stuck with building 3 Athlon X2's (3800+, 4600+ and 4200+). One board is a 690G that does have a bios for Phenom, one is a 780G and the 690V won't support Phenom anyways. My whole question is will I "need" a quad core in games prior to December? I might "need" a quad core in encoding, but I don't run a business, an extra minute or so is no big deal. I just don't think that B3 will bring enough to warrant the upgrade I've been saying I'd get.
If the promises of Deneb become reality, then Deneb compared to B3 Phenom will be like an Allendale to a Pentium D. It won't be a completely new architecture, but a 45nm process with higher clocks will make it seem like a new architecture. I didn't say Conroe because I don't think the difference will be that great, so I chose the lesser cache C2D's for the example.
I just wish AMD had managed a way to put two Brisbanes together at 65nm and ditched the native quad core. This time, Intel was right to not go native until the process fully supported it.