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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think AMD physically swaps out defective cores. I believe they're disabled individually in some kind of firmware. That's ef
by darkmighty 9y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think AMD physically swaps out defective cores. I believe they're disabled individually in some kind of firmware. That's effective because the interconnect region is significantly smaller than the core area (and possibly made more reliable through feature size manipulation?). I think this has been standard practice almost dating back to multi-core introduction, where they sell high end multi-core chips as low end with some cores disabled.
- gsnedders 9y agoNote parent was talking about die and not cores. AMD are shipping multi-chip modules with ThreadRipper (with two die) and EPYC (with four), and then because they are separate die you can trivially swap them out.
- jlebrech 9y agoi believe this is a way for them to maximise yield, say their threshold is at least 3 dies must be good, and only 1 can be passable, then when they do tests and only 2 are good, they can swap out one of the passable ones, they can also rate the cpus differently too, they could also just swap out dies when all fail the test, i.e with threadripper and replace with another 2, then rate those.