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Putting the extra silicon on the chip is effectively free. If you need that silicon to actually work, then it's not free. Floor-sweeping is necessary because t
by ssp 16y ago
Putting the extra silicon on the chip is effectively free.
If you need that silicon to actually work, then it's not free. Floor-sweeping is necessary because the more stuff you put on a chip, the more likely it is to have defects. That really is an extra cost. I don't think there is any way around that.
- nl 16y agoOk. Yes, there is extra silicon. But it's so insignificant that it doesn't matter. But I think you are overestimating how low-end these chips are. See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2008/02/small-wonder-inside-intels-silverthorne-ultramobile-cpu.ars http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2008/02/small-wonder-ins... for example, which shows that the Silverthorne architecture (1st Gen Atom) has pretty much the same transistor count as a Pentium 4. No one thought that the fact the Pentium 4 had to support x86 was a significant factor vs other architectures. For the chips we are talking about, the cache memory takes more transistors, so the quality thing is pretty insignificant too.
- junkbit 16y agoYes, they don't disable 1 core out of spite, it is because of the difficulty/cost of a high yield The situation is even worse for graphics cards