During die testing, AMD's engineers noticed that there was an occasional frequency mis-match among cores. That meant that the core that couldn't hit higher frecuencies was actually holding the rest back. At this point, the choice to fuse the processor at the silicon level as a triple-core was made, instead of downgrading the whole pack by fusing it as a slower quad.

"Since the processors are 'fused' at the silicon level during production, our sources inside AMD say that attempts to 'unlock' the turned off core will be impossible from the outside by simply connecting pins or something like that."

All of this thanks, supposedly, to the Phenom being a native quad-core processor (unlike Intel offerings). All the dynamic L3 cache will still be available for the remaining three cores, which might help. In cases where more cache and raw clock speed is beneficial to performance, the triple-cores could actually beat the quads.

Legit Reviews also points out that "the Microsoft Xbox 360 has triple-core architecture and as a result, the games are being designed for this hardware structure". Can anybody comment on this?

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