www.LLY.get.to: AMD Phenom Benchmark: Triple Core 8600 vs Quad Core 9600

AMD's Phenoms Benchmark:
Triple-Core 8600 vs Quad-Core 9600

Based on a single die design, AMD's K10 are vulnerable to manufacturing defects. To counter the low-yields, they decided to disable the 'buggy' core and sell them as triple-cores. This process allows AMD to launch a wide range of products with dual, tri and quad core processors fitting every price points in the market. Resulting from AMD's pricing strategy, these triple-cores will be competing against Intel's 45nm Wolfdale Core 2 Duo. But in this extract of the original review (in Chinese), we shall see how the tri-core will perform against it's own quad-core brother.

Looking at the identification code,
we can see that the naming schema has changed since the dual-core days.

CPU-Z reveals that the processor is based on the Toliman core,
and shares the same amount of L3 (2MB) as its quad-core brother.

Test Platform:

AMD Phenom X4 9600 （Socket AM2+, 2.3GHz, 4*512K L2, 2MB L3）
AMD Phenom X3 8600 （Socket AM2+, 2.3Ghz, 3*512K L2, 2MB L3）
AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+ （Socket AM2, 2.3Ghz, 2*512K L2）

Motherboard: MSI K9N2 Platinum
Memory: PNY 1Gb×2 DDR2-800 (6-5-5-15 2T)
Storage: Seagate SATA 320G 7200.10
Graphics: XFX GeForce 8800Ultra

O/S: Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 + DirectX 9.0c
Driver: ForceWare 169.09 WHQL

Test Results: