3 ms·

Why are chips in the centre plain blue and better?

• bayindirh 7y ago
  Plain blue is not a reason but a result. Center of a silicon wafer is said to be have a higher quality (due to lithography, physical stresses and other processes which I don't know exact details of), and the result is a die with more homogeneous properties and color reflection. Since the die's tolerances were lower around the center of the wafer, the performance of the resulting chip was better. AMD was also sub-binning most of these parts (they were sold as Athlon 1700 @ 1433MHz regardless of their performance level), so people were buying these unlocked sleepers and overclocking them to insane levels without voltage increases. However, today the processes is so different and node sizes are so small that the dies' color are different and not perceivable anyway. In the older days, this issue was more of an obscure, collective wisdom which resulted from trial and error days of overclocking wars.