With only one day to spare before the start of the infamous Intel Developer Forum, AMD announced plans for another processor design. With this latest chip, AMD is hoping to make up for its recent loss of market share to its arch rival, Intel. What makes this new chip proposal interesting is the fact that these new chips will only have three processing cores. That’s right: tri-core CPU’s. Intended to be part of the upcoming Phenom lineup, AMD says that it hopes to market its newest creation towards budget minded multi-taskers, and that it will be available in the first quarter of 2008.

Making processors is a tricky business. When you’re building chips where certain parts are on the order of only a 100 atoms across, you’re bound to have failures. Usually when things go haywire in the manufacturing process, the manufacturer is forced to discard the product and start over. Unfortunately, each time you’re forced into this position, you’re wasting time, energy, and, most importantly, money. Especially for a company that’s in such dire straits as AMD, any loss of money in the manufacturing process is unacceptable.

The announcement of this new chip right after the introduction of “Barcelona” makes perfect sense when you think about it. Suppose that one of those newly introduced quad-core chips gets to the end of the line, only to fail a quality control test because a single core failed to work properly. What do you do? Well, just label it as a tri-core, test it, rate it, and ship it.

This practice isn’t new at all: practically every chip vendor does it. Intel’s Celeron and AMD’s Duron chips were the same as Pentium 4 and Athlon, respectively, just with some cache memory disabled. Even though there might be a few thousand defective transistors on the chips, they still function properly, although just not as fast.

Since the tri-core Phenom chips have only just been announced, we can only speculate about how these chips will perform. What this move from AMD might suggest, however, is that the yields from the new “Barcelona” lineup aren’t turning out as well as AMD expected, and that maybe the glitches which caused the initial “Barcelona” delay haven’t been completely solved. Either way, though, this move allows AMD to make money off of products which it would otherwise have dumped in the trash.