rhorwitz :
The Phenom is a still born product, much like the K-5 back 15 years ago. AMD is facing bankruptcy and all they can do is piss away money to release a product that can't even compare with the technology they made 5 years ago. How pathetic!! AMD would have been more successful if they invested in shrinking existing technology to 45 nm and and placing two 2-cores on a chip like Intel.
I think you have it backwards. While Phenom may be boring to the enthusiast crowd, other than to diehard AMD fans, it is not boring at all to the Joe Average out on the street. Its exciting to him. After all, he can go into Best Buy and get a tri core AMD for less money than a dual core Intel, and that looks very good to him.
As for the idea that all AMD "can do is piss away money to release a product", they aren't pissing away money at all. Just the reverse. They have a given number of quad core CPUs that have a bad core. So they can either throw away the faulty CPU, or deactivate the faulty core and sell it as a tri core. This doesn't cost them anything to do, while it gives them a chance to make at least some money out of the product. The only failure here is that the tri cores are too expensive compared to the quad cores. Bring the tri core down another $50 and it would look like a fair deal. As it is, its too close to the quad core in price to make it worthwhile.
As for 45nm technology, AMD needs money now just to survive. It has to pay off creditors before it can do any R&D. So it sells what it has. Fortunately, AMD also has the ATI division which is selling video cards fairly well and with th upcoming 4xxx series cards, it may have a real winner. Also, it has the ATI chipsets which bring in money. But for the moment, income to pay off debts is the major need for survival, not making CPUs that will overclock great for the tiny amount of enthusiasts who like such things.
As for making two dual cores on one chip, a reasonable question is, why? Sure its cheaper than making a native four core chip, but why not just make a chipset that allows two dual core chips to be used? Oh yes, some people will remember the QFX and laugh, what a failure it was, yet the failure was not in the idea, but in the design and the high heat CPUs that were used. Even then, the design was OK for business useage, but not for gamers. So change the chipset design and use two dual core chips wired in to work like a single quad core instead of two dual cores. Should work, should be cheaper than making quad core chips, whether glued together or native. Problem is, AMD doesn't have any dual core chips which might work. A couple 5000+ BE chips would look good, but the built in memory controllers would become a problem. Could one chip have the memory controller turned off and then only one chip would control everything? Maybe, but I don't know that answer.
All that said, I think the tri core is good marketing of chips that would otherwise end up in a scrap heap.