4 ms·
This is more common than you think. The CPU in your computer might have more good cores than you are allowed to use for example. You paid for 4 cores? You get 4
by dkarras 7y ago
This is more common than you think. The CPU in your computer might have more good cores than you are allowed to use for example. You paid for 4 cores? You get 4 cores, but your chip might actually have 8 good cores, just locked because you didn't pay more.
- waste_monk 7y agoMy understanding is they test all the CPUs and differentiate them by the test results - you might have four of eight cores sitting there unused that are fine most of the time but have some weird edge case, so they disable the four for QC purposes and sell it as a lower end processor. It's not quite the same as locking them down just to sell them as a lower end unit, they'd rather it worked perfectly and sell it at the higher end. Unless you're talking about Intel's "upgradeable" processors [1] which you could pay more to unlock performance (but that was unlocking more L1 cache, not cores AFAIK) [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/83896-intel-offering-cpu-upgrade-card https://www.extremetech.com/computing/83896-intel-offering-c...
- Scoundreller 7y agoThey eventually figure out their yield issues. Do they then abandon the low-end market? Of course not.
- dwaite 7y agoSort of. They definitely perform this sort of binning, but the demand of the parts in the market and the success rates are things they have to estimate beforehand. If they'd run out of the higher-end binned parts, they have sold out. But if they run out of the lower-end binned parts, they just relabel the higher-end parts and keep selling both lines. Yield also isn't constant, so odds are the number of parts binned higher goes up over time as well.