AMD's three core strategy is taking an interesting turn. AMD currently positions its three core CPUs against Intel's duals, and if the applications you're running are properly multi threaded, there is a chance that AMD's three core will end up faster than Intel's Core 2 Duo or Pentium dual-core.

Intel was successful to sell the message that K10 based Phenom X3 are broken and it served Intel well last year, but after being able to unlock Phenom II X3 and get a quad-core for the price of Intel’s dual-core, the table has turned in AMD's favour. All off a sudden Phenom II X3 720 got a really hot seller.

We’ve also heard that there will be more motherboard manufactures who will accidentally find a way to unlock the fourth core, and users will get a free core. The same strategy might be used for dual-cores, as there should be boards that should be able to unlock Phenom II X2 to a Phenom II X4 quad core. AMD will kind of look in the other direction as officially it won’t like or allow it, but since this strategy has a huge chance to increase sales, it will let it happen.