> e.g. if a high-end CPU has bad transistors in a section of the cache, that section of the cache is disabled and the CPU can carry on its life as a Celeron Fo

> e.g. if a high-end CPU has bad transistors in a section of the cache, that section of the cache is disabled and the CPU can carry on its life as a Celeron For me, that's the part that is really fascinating about the fab industry. We have a statistically-reliable method of fabbing, but we build in the necessary fallbacks in the chip design itself that if a chip partially fails quality control, we can scale it back and sell it as lower-end product. It's intriguingly analogous to the quality process in gemstones, except that chips aren't found---they're made via mechanisms that we can't perfectly control.