...but the lack of SMT can mean some power savings, and this might be popular for internet cafes or schools that want efficiency to lower their power bill. To further back my theory, Internet cafe users would not need SMT anyway. 6 threads are enough for games today, and students can get away with even 2 cores.
Disabling SMT is not likely to reduce power draw by any significant amount, aside from in tasks fully utilizing all cores, and even in those cases you will be losing an amount of performance that's disproportionately larger than the amount of power being saved, meaning you will actually see lower efficiency without SMT. It could even increase the power draw in some less heavily-threaded workloads if two threads that could efficiently be run on one core with SMT, need to be run on two cores instead. SMT is in part a power-saving feature (and in part a silicon-saving feature), since it allows each core to be more efficiently utilized for multithreaded workloads with a minimal increase in chip size and power draw relative to the performance gained.
And this is all the same silicon. The 3500X utilizes the same 8-core, 16-thread chiplet as the other 3000-series desktop processors, just with 2 cores disabled much like the 3600 and 3600X, but also with the use of SMT locked out. So at idle and in lightly-threaded workloads, power draw will be very similar between the 3500X, 3600 and 3600X.
Its the cheapest 6 core processor, but given very strong competition from Intel at the lower end, this processor makes no sense at all since it is likely going to be consistently slower.
It's not the cheapest 6-core at this time, and being a 6-core processor doesn't matter all that much if it lacks SMT. It will in most cases perform like a 4-core, 8-thread processor at both light and heavily-threaded workloads. It really should not be priced much higher than the 3300X's $120 MSRP, even though that CPU was only available in limited quantities. And I suspect the OEMs were not paying much more than that for them.
Most likely, the 3500X is only coming to US online stores now as OEMs try to offload them to make room for new and upcoming processors in this range from both Intel and AMD. Even last-year's i5-10400/10400F outperforms this processor at heavily-multithreaded tasks by a decent margin due to its inclusion of SMT, while providing similar performance at lightly-threaded workloads, and those processors can now be had starting at a little over $150, so a 3500X should be priced below that at this point. Likewise, the new i5-11400/11400F outperforms the 3600 and 3600X by a decent margin and are priced under $190 for the version with integrated graphics, and even less for the version without (when its in-stock), so paying $200+ for the 3600 or 3600X no longer makes much sense either. The 3600 really needs to be priced more like the $160-$170 sale pricing it was seeing for much of last year for it to be worth considering, and the 3600X not much more, while the 3500X should be priced no more than $130-$140 to properly compete with Intel's current lineup.
Of course, it's unlikely that these processors are being manufactured in any significant quantities at this point, and we will likely be seeing them replaced with more value-oriented 5000-series models eventually, once AMD manages to catch up enough on supply to justify dedicating more of their limited manufacturing capacity to lower-end processors.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram