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In fairness, CPU segmentation is not just disabling working hardware. Silicon is a lottery and a many dies will be only partially working, or have worse perform
by TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
In fairness, CPU segmentation is not just disabling working hardware. Silicon is a lottery and a many dies will be only partially working, or have worse performance than other dies, so you fuse off the bits that don't work and sell the die as a particular SKU. However, if you don't have enough defective dies for a particular low-end SKU, I assume that does result in working parts of dies being fused off.
- wtallis 7y agoSomewhat infamously, Intel once sold some low-end CPU models primarily to PC OEMs and then turned around and offered end-users a $50 software patch to unlock the other half of their L2 cache. Meaning that the whole cache passed QA even for the low end parts and half of it was disabled purely to prop up the price of mid-range parts.