AMD says that quad-core desktop chip have taken only 2% of the market since Intel started shipping the wee beasts in November - a fact Intel lays to their premium prices and the lack of software that can take advantage of them - so a seemingly contrary AMD is going to come out with a three-core desktop Phenom chip in the first quarter.

It's unclear whether that solves the problem of exploitative consumer software, but it appears we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Microsoft contributed that it is exploring the possibility of taking advantage of said chip's power and performance improvements in its widgetry.

Anyway, AMD concludes that the slight quad-core penetration figures mean the market wants a wider-selection of multi-core solutions and that an odd number might stimulate broader multi-core adoption particularly in certain gaming and digital content creation scenarios.

Apparently it's trying for a piece of the 12%-15% of the market that Intel has been selling dual-cores to. AMD has been weak in high-end dual-cores.

All three of the AMD cores will be on a single piece of silicon just like its first quad-core Phenoms due in December. The Phenoms will all apparently have a shared L3 cache to optimize the performance of multi-threaded software as well as HyperTransport 3.0.