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Today AMD is releasing the Phenom Tri-Core processor, and they were kind enough to send us a Phenom 8750 for testing.

The AMD Phenom 8750 runs at 2.4GHz (12x200) and is based on the same die as the quad core Phenom processors. As you may be aware, the initial launch of the quad core Phenom processors was plagued by the "TLB erratum" - a bug that could cause occasionally cause the processor to hang under certain heavy loads. Since then, AMD has come out with a new 'B3' stepping of the Phenom die, and this stepping apparently fixes the erratum - which is a very good thing as in our testing, the microcode based fix could have a significant impact on performance.

As we have covered the initial Phenom 9600, and the yet unreleased Phenom 9900, we will not cover the Phenom micro-architecture here; as there have been no changes since that time - other than the TLB fix.

So what is a Tri-Core processor?

Simple.

It is either a quad core processor where one of the four cores failed AMD's quality control testing, and had the defective core disabled - and is now sold as a tri-core - or it is a quad core processor that had one of its working cores disabled in order to be able to market a tri-core SKU.

Regardless of how it became a tri-core part, I was interested to see how our 8750 would perform compared to not only the quad core Phenoms, but also a "Black Edition" dual core AMD 5000+ X2. I also threw in a comparison to a Core 2 Duo E6750, a 2.67GHz part - giving it a 267MHz speed advantage at stock speeds - to see how the tri-core would compare to an equivalently priced dual core Intel part. After all, AMD is trying to position the tri-core parts as a viable alternative to some dual core parts -- so let's see if they accomplished this goal with some testing.