http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inqu [...] -santa-cap

Gee ... a big price cut on the way !!

Now your talking !!

If they are half the price of a QX6600 then thats a good deal.

Wow, I was going with Q6600 in my new rig, but this changes everything. Considering I will be using it mostly for gaming at 1900x1200, speed of the processor is not hugely important. Now if I could just get my hands on two 3870's...

Doubtful however that resellers will lower prices on Phenom to that of X2. I can see maybe 10% discount, but places like NewEgg will still keep the price jacked up far above wholesale simply because it's newer and in-demand.

. o O (spamazed... is that really a werd... you could use in scrabble?)

Sounds like a liquidation sale.

Quite a smart move by AMD. Flush out those stockpiles of errata-ridden (read: defective) cpus and get people to buy AM2(+) boards. Once the customers are caught in the spiders web (read: hooked on the platform) they can upgrade it with working or improved CPUs later.
Way better than driving those chips to the desert and crushing them under steel tracks.

Fun aside, i would be seriously interested in knowing how serious that TLB bug really is. How often does it occur? What applications increase the likelyhood of it showing up? And i don't want those "rarely" statements. Numbers, numbers, numbers.
And what exactly are the consequences of the bug? A lock-up? Data Corruption? A slowdown?

It would be meaningless no matter how low the price tag if what we can see is a sold-out tag beside...

Could be true, but the Inquirer is known for teiling porkies

Wow! Cool! Nothing like a pre/post Christmas price drop! I hope this trickles down to the X2 line.

The new 790FX motherboard from DFI just became available on Newegg. This mobo paired with a 6400BE or 5000BE and a shiny new 8800GT or 8800GTS would make for a nice upgradeable gaming machine.

Interesting indeed...

Now this has some possibilities. I had really looked forward to the Phenom. Even realizing before its release that it wasn't going to perform in the top end like Intel chips, it would be a good step up from what I have. But then it became apparent that the Phenom is a pig that may well be slower than my current overclocked 4400+ cpu. No matter how much its dressed up, or how cheap the price gets, its still a pig. Maybe, just maybe, a 9700 Black Edition model would be worth it if the cost was low enough, but that's a big Maybe, and a big IF.

The only answer I've come up with to date is getting the DFI board and an AM2 5000+ BE, just as Chunky writes, especially if the AM2 chips come down in price a bit. Then if (a big IF) a later Phenom comes out that is fixed and performs decently, I can upgrade to that.

Or I could spend a bunch more money and get an Intel powered rig that I know will scream.

Or you could get both!

Why would you buy a phenom unless your building a budget system?
Intel has a 6 core cpu due out soon, that means qx6600 cpu will drop again in price.

I want to know if they're doing this just to get rid of the defective phenom chip's or if they plan to actually sell the fixed version's at that price as well?

That would mean you could but a quad core for around $170!!

That's insane..

Plan on selling at that price. Because Intel will be releasing Yorkfield based Quads at around that price range and around the same clocks.

Yorkfield > Phenom.

Intel's 45nm Quad's will further increase profits for Intel. AMD is in a world of hurt right now. I might buy a Phenom just to say I own the most over-hyped blunder ever.

so, are these defective as in, they crash your computer, or are they defective as in, can't reach the right clock speeds?

Under certain circumstances, they crash repeatedly. Often needing a fix applied which disables the TLB (Translation Lookaside Buffer: a small cache used to temporarily store calculation answers for quicker re-access mainly used to improve the speed of virtual address translation).

Think of it as the memory option on a calculator

So ~20% performance drop when the TLB patch/fix is applied.

If phenom can't compete performance wise with the q6600, then a low power model is what I want. The 1.7 barcelona only used 55 watts; too bad they don't have any phenoms that energy efficient. Not everyone needs top performance.