Where the hell are the damn X2 7000 series chips they mention in them slides? They have been promising kuma's release for more than a freaking year and it still hasnt seen the light of day. IMO releasing duals late is stupid stupid stupid cause by the time they get out their they have hoped people would get their x3 and x4 chips, and the only market for the duals is the bottom of the barrel crap where they cant possibly make money with those chips, even if they are denebs with 2 cores cut and the l3 cache cut out. They are a day late and a dollar short, cause by the time the duals come to market people that have been waiting for something from AMD will likely say frack it and get a quad or triple core cause they are tired of waiting.
I think you might be onto something.
If your AMD and you really are just cutting the cores/cash down on defective chips to produce x2 and x3 chips wouldn't you rather people still buy the more expensive model? The chip costs them the same to make, it probably costs a little more in fact because on the neutered models they have to do extra work to disable the defective parts. Sure it saves them money by selling these chips anyway (instead of trashing the whole chip) but given the choice wouldn't you think they would rather sell only the more expensive chips so they make more money?
Duals are generally going down a bit in popularity. When people upgrade or buy a new computer just about anyone trying to sell them the parts/PCs is going to be pushing a quad core (more money). Even the folks who know the difference and what it all really means are going more and more to quads simply because they are reaching close to the same speeds as the duals (throwing out the faster in single threaded apps argument) and obviously will perform better in multi threaded apps (which are becoming more popular, especially in areas like gaming).
Combine that with the fact that if these are defective quads then AMD has to wait to stock up enough defective and converted chips from production of the quads to be able to sell them in numbers large enough to meet orders. Those orders would probably be pretty good from OEM PC makers because of the cheap cost that they can get the chips (probably make a deal with AMD to get the chips at little more than manufacturing costs, AMD might give up on profit with them just to cut the losses of not selling them). Also take into account the fact that these are most likely the chips that not only didn't make it as quads but also couldn't make it as X3s, the "yield" on them is probably pretty low. One of the goals in manufacturing CPUs is to have as high a yield as possible, if they are starting them all out as quads and they have a good manufacturing process going, they just might not be getting as many defective chips. This is good for AMD, bad if your hoping for a new cheap dualy or x3. OEMs will see their orders first and what is left will get sold to everyone else (OEMs have contracts which is a lot more money than we can guarantee AMD for cheap chips).
I think given the point of view for AMD these things aren't exactly a priority to get on the consumer market. Maybe get them to OEMs a little faster but for those of us who buy and build they are most likely focusing a little bit more on the quad core lines and the x3s to fall back on.
At least, that is how I am looking at it at this point. I know that is how I would push the products. Try to sell the ones you make the most on and work down the line from there. The bottom of the line that you get the least of (unless they have a horrible manufacturing process) will take the longest to get out and not be that big of a concern.
Anyway, I can't wait until next week to see the new naming scheme for the deneb chips. I do know that I would enjoy seeing some benches and numbers being released. I also really hope that these perform as well as AMD is suggesting. Two reasons for that, first off I just want the chips to perform well because I want to buy one. Secondly I don't think AMD needs the chips that are released to perform worse than what they say they will (won't look too good). They can release low numbers and when official numbers come out the reviews will call them better than expected, "a success", they fall short of those numbers and it will suddenly be reviewed as a "disappointment". AMD needs all of the good press that they can get right now, I am tired of watching the value of my shares go down.
