AMD introduced the Phenom in 2007 as successor to the Athlon 64 X2 and to compete with strong going Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad. In a further attempt to compete and maximise profit AMD launched the Phenom X3 in 2008 which is basically a Phenom X4 but with one core disabled.

Since Phenom X4 consists of one big 'die' ( "core" ) AMD would have to discard the CPU if one core turned out to be defective. By introducing the Phenom X3, AMD could disable one of the defective cores and still sell the manufactured product.

The technique of disabling defective parts is not new. The AMD Duron 'Applebred' is basically an AMD Athlon 'Thoroughbred' with L2-cache disabled. The same works for 'Thorton' but also in many graphics cards manufactured by nVidia, ATi/AMD it is accustomed to disable defective rendering pipelines. > Read more

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