Tucked away in Intel's marketing material was an image of Sandy E's processor die, and it was immediately obvious that this was in fact an eight-core chip with two of the cores fused off.

When we asked some Intel suits for an explanation, they rolled out some guff about balancing clockspeeds with cores and doing what was right for customers. Funny thing is, when AMD was more competitive, turning off cores didn't seem like the right thing to do.

So there's one thing we aren't being totally ripped off for. Good times.

What I found more interesting was the stuff about Intel:


Looks like Intel's R&D guys can have next year off.