Depending on how successful AMD's new triple core CPU is, it will either go down in history as a marketing achievement or blunder. I mean, we're not really talking about new technology here- the Phenom X3 is the same CPU as the Phenom X4 with one core shut off. Its as plain and simple as that. AMD's "true" quad core architecture allows them to do this which is unlike Intel's Quad Core architecture at the moment that simply puts two dual core CPUs together. Here are some specifications for the Phenom X3 8750 that AMD sent us for review.

As you can see from the CPU-Z screenshot above, the three cores are running at 2.4GHz with a total of 3x512k=1.5MB L2 cache. The amount of L3 cache remains the same as the X4 CPUs at 2MB. Like the Phenom X4 9850, these triple core CPUs are based on the B3 stepping which is free of the TLB Erratum Bug

Lets just get right into the benchmarks and see how the X2 performs compared to some other CPUs. For the testbed, we have the MSI 780 chipset based motherboard for AMD platform and Intel X48 chipset based boards for the Intel Platform. All systems are outfitted with an 8800GTX graphics card and 2GB RAM running Windows Vista