AMD Now Shipping 8, 12-core Processors To Early Customers, OEMs

>> consists of two Istanbul cores side-by-side on the same package

At 3x the price due to yield loss, or can they salvage the others to be sold as single-core?

I'm actually more interested to find out what's larger: The 48-core Maranello, or my cell phone.

Are you guys generally leading towards AMD or Intel based CPU's? Which offers the best value?

It really depends on what your looking for and willing to spend Komando at least for me. The I7 1366 socket runs more expensive than the A3 right now, but it also performs better and has triple channel memory rather than the A3 which is dual channel. The 1156 I7 and I5 is dual channel and performs above the A3 but to a lesser degree. It is close to the same price and maybe a little more than the Athlon comparable on board and required memory.

So if I could spend whatever I wanted I would have a 1366 socket or a Phenom 2 (A3 chip socket) to choose from. The 1156 will not move up to the 6 or 8 core Intel chips when they get here. While both the A3 socket board, and 1366 will move up to (Bull Dozer AMD) (Nehalem 6-8 core Intel), the next level chips. Also USB3 and Sata3 sockets and devices are still coming on the market (though the adapters seem to be able to work on any board with spare PCI-X slots, and under $100), so I would say that not a main concern.

On a personal level I like AMD, but Intel does outperform them if your willing to pay the price. I could readily afford an AMD system which would at least be comparable. I would have to save for a little bit to do Intel 1366 (the boards and memory are both 100-150 above the AMD priceline). Everything is also really moving at breakneck speed right now as well. This AMD announcement was not even predicted until quarter 3 of this year at the best.

However; if you've been in the hardware market for any time, you also know if you make it 3-6 months without being outclassed on any system you buy nowadays, your doing well. I personally don't care about this and generally upgrade every 3 years or so no rush, when I feel the market is at a decent place, price and performance wise.

Either way with anything you get I would only use either the 1366 or A3 motherboard, and what goes along with it. This extends you a ways with upgrade options for now.

For the extended multi-core processor issue though really, I don't think the current software or hardware takes full advantage of a quad core yet. So a 6-8-12 core chip to me is necessary only really for very specific things. Digital imaging, Science, Accounting, Architectural design and of course servers or large media processing Units. Other than that the highest performing thing would be media transfer and gaming for a general user, and quad cores are in general above the needs even for that right now. Unless of course you do any of the other application types I mentioned oh and maybe Music production.

Tech Report recently did a massive, comprehensive roundup and examination of Core i3 vs. Athlon II: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/18448

Also, Socket is AM3, not A3. Whether or not AMD outperforms Intel is going to depend strongly on which products you're examining and how you rank price vs. price/performance vs. power consumption.