7 ms·

It’s worth keeping in mind that the silicon lottery is very much a thing at these nanometer sizes. So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away

• inetknght 5y ago
  > By fusing off the broken and one of the good ones, they can sell it as a two core SKU. Fuse off the broken one? Sure, makes sense. Fuse off a good one? That's arguably amoral and should be discouraged. Three cores can be better than two. Let the consumer disable the runt core if they need.
  • dev_tty01 5y ago
    Amoral? Why? They advertise a two core part, you pay for a two core part, you get a two core part. Completely fair.
    • hnuser123456 5y ago
      Because if they're capable of making plenty of good 4-cores but have more demand for 2-cores so are cutting good 4c, they should just make the 4-cores a little cheaper. But maybe they already do this. Anyways, agreed ECC should be standard, but it requires an extra die and most people can do fine without it, so it probably won't happen. But an ECC CPU option with clearly marketed consumer full ECC RAM would be nice. DDR5 is a nice step in this direction but isn't "full" ECC.
      • dageshi 5y ago
        I don't know if mobile cores factor into the same process, but if you have a lot of demand for 2 core system for cheap laptops that can't supply the power or cooling for a 4 core then having more 4 cores, even if they're cheaper doesn't help.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  • deedree 5y ago
    To be pedantic, you mean immoral right? It's bad, they shouldn't waste usable resources just to fit their marketing scheme. Amoral means that it is not moral or immoral.
    • lupire 5y ago
      It's amoral because they act based on incentives and not the commenter's religious beliefs.
  • brianwawok 5y ago
    Wait till you find out that two people side by side on an airplane may pay 10x or more difference in ticket price, for the same ride.
    • colejohnson66 5y ago
      Such as some airlines having a “business/first class” that’s nothing but “board before the plebs”
      • Arainach 5y ago
        No, the scenario is that there are massive price differences even for the same class of seats. Traditionally, the major long haul airlines sold seats weeks/months in advance at rates that were basically losing money but made almost all of their per flight profit on last minute bookings at higher rates. These were usually business flights, but not necessarily (not usually, even) business class. Business models for budget airlines (RyanAir, etc.) are a bit different but that's not relevant here.
    • rozap 5y ago
      Wait until they find out about the fact that all new BMWs come with heated seats, but you need to pay a monthly subscription to have them enabled.
  • jvanderbot 5y ago
    That's not amoral. It's missing a market opportunity, but conflating that with morality is an interesting way of looking at it. Businesses don't owe you a product (before you pay for it) any more than you owe them loyalty after you pay for something. They will suffer when someone else offers what you want and you leave. That's the point of markets and competition.
    • scoopertrooper 5y ago
      Maybe 'amoral' is a bit strong, but I think there is something wrong with an economic system where producers destroy wealth, rather than distribute all that is produced. If it's wrong for the government to pay farmers to burn crops during a depression, then it's wrong for a monopoly to disable chip capabilities during a chip shortage.
      • jvanderbot 5y ago
        I think you're framing the supply chain in a very personal (strawman) way. The problem is just one of "efficiency". The production is not perfectly aligned with where people are willing to spend money. A purely efficient market exists only in theory / textbooks / Adam Smith's Treatise. The chips that roll off a fab are not done. They aren't "burning crops". Perhaps they are abandoned (not completed) perhaps because they need to recoup or save resources to focus on finishing and shipping the working (full core) products. They aren't driving their trucks of finished products into the ocean.
        • scoopertrooper 5y ago
          > The problem is just one of "efficiency". The production is not perfectly aligned with where people are willing to spend money. A purely efficient market exists only in theory / textbooks / Adam Smith's Treatise. Destroying wealth is not appropriate the market mechanism to deal with disequilibrium. Producers should either lower the price to meet the market or hold inventory if they anticipate increased future demand. However, the latter may be harder to do in the CPU business because inventory depreciates rapidly. Intel has hitherto been minimally affected by market pressures because they held an effective monopoly on the CPU market though that is fast changing. So, there is nothing necessarily "efficient" about what Intel is doing. They're maximising their returns through price discrimination at the expense of allocative efficiency. > The chips that roll off a fab are not done. They aren't "burning crops". Perhaps they are abandoned (not completed) perhaps because they need to recoup or save resources to focus on finishing and shipping the working (full core) products. They aren't driving their trucks of finished products into the ocean. That may be true in some cases, but not in others. I'm speaking directly to the case where a component is deliberately modified to reduce its capability for the specific purpose of price discrimination.
• alexhawke 5y ago
  Apple produces one A series chip for the iPhones every year. How does that work?
  • secondaryacct 5y ago
    It doesnt, still cant game with it.
  • tcoff91 5y ago
    Baseless speculation: perhaps they do actually throw away chips? They only really target a premium market segment so perhaps it's not worth it to their brand to try and keep those chips.
    • sdenton4 5y ago
      Turns out the Apple tax means you're also buying the three chips thrown away to produce your one...
      • gleenn 5y ago
        That's not really an Apple tax though, that's a cost of doing business tax. It's not like Intel and AMD and everyone else aren't effectively doing the same exact thing.
        • dragontamer 5y ago
          Intel and AMD __literally__ sell those broken chips to the open marketplace, recouping at least some of the costs (or possibly getting a profit from them). Apple probably does the same strategy PS3 did: create a 1-PPE + 8-SPE chip, but sell it as a 1-PPE + 7-SPE chip (assume one breaks). This increases yields, and it means that all 7-SPE + 8-SPE chips can be sold. 6-SPE-chips (and below) are thrown away, which is a small minority. Especially as the process matures and reliability of manufacturing increases over time.
          • gleenn 5y ago
• chippiewill 5y ago
  > Does this excuse Intel’s form of market segmentation? No. They almost certainly disable, for example, hyperthreading on cores that support it - just for the segmentation. I think even this is a bit unfair. Intel's segmentation is definitely still overkill, but it's worth bearing in mind that the cost of the product is not just the marginal cost of the materials and labour. Most of the cost (especially for intel) is going to be upfront costs like R&D on the chip design, and the chip foundry process. I don't think it's unreasonable for Intel to be able to sell an artificially gimped processor at a lower price, because the price came out of thin air in the first place. The point at which this breaks is when Intel doesn't have any real competition and uses segmentation as a way to raise prices on higher end chips rather than as a way to create cheaper SKUs.
  • arcticbull 5y ago
    Without knowing what the silicon lottery distribution actually looks like we can't really say that. > "... but it's worth bearing in mind that the cost of the product is not just the marginal cost of the materials and labour." Yes, you could choose to amortize it over every product but then you're selling each CPU for the same price no matter which functional units happen to be defective on a given part. Since that's not a great strategy (who wants to pay the same for a 12 core part as a 4 core part because the amount of sand that went into it is the same?) you then begin to assign more value to the parts with more function, do you not? And then this turns into a gradient. And eventually, you charge very little for the parts that only reception PCs require, and a lot more for the ones that perform much better. Once you get to diminishing returns there's going to be a demographic you can charge vastly more for that last 1% juice, because either they want to flex or at their scale it matters. Pretty soon once you get to the end of the thought exercise it starts to look an awful lot like Intel's line-up. I think what folks don't realize is even now, Intel 10nm fully functional yields are ~50%. That means the other half of those parts, if we're lucky, can be tested and carved up to lower bins. Even within the "good" 50% certain parts are going to be able to perform much better than others.
  • dodobirdlord 5y ago
    > The point at which this breaks is when Intel doesn't have any real competition and uses segmentation as a way to raise prices on higher end chips rather than as a way to create cheaper SKUs. I’m not sure that this is really fair to call broken. This sort of fine granularity market segmentation allows Intel to maximize revenue by selling at every point along the demand curve, getting a computer into each customer’s hands that meets their needs at a price that they are willing to pay. Higher prices on the high end enables lower prices on the low end. If Intel chose to split the difference and sell a small number of standard SKUs in the middle of the price range, it would benefit those at the high end and harm those at the low end. Obviously people here on HN have a particular bias on this tradeoff, but it’s important to keep things in perspective. Fusing off features on lower-priced SKUs allows those SKUs to be sold at that price point at all. If those SKUs cannibalized demand for their higher tier SKUs, they would just have to be dropped from the market. Obviously Intel is not a charity, and they’re not doing this for public benefit, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a public benefit. Enabling sellers to sell products at the prices that people are willing/able to pay is good for market efficiency, since it since otherwise vendors have to refuse some less profitable but still profitable sales. It is unfortunate though that this has led to ECC support being excluded from consumer devices.
• techrat 5y ago
  > So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away every chip that had one of the four cores come out broken, they’d lose a lot of money and have to raise prices to compensate. Except in the case with the Pentium special edition 2 cores and i3 parts, Intel actually designed a separate two core part that wouldn't have the benefit of re-enabling cores among hobbyists. And then there's the artificial segmentation by disabling Xeon support among consumer boards... even though the Xeon branded parts were identical to i7s (with the GPU disabled) and adding (or removing) a pin on a socket between generations even though the chipset supports the CPU itself (and the CPU runs on the socket fine with an adapter.) Intel definitely did everything they could to make it as confusing as possible.
  • StillBored 5y ago
    Its just the behavior of a monopolist where they are making their product line as efficient as possible by milking every last penny out of every single customer. In a truly competitive ecosystem features that have additional cost would be the only ones that actually cost more, and artificial limits wouldn't work because the vendor with less market share would just throw them in for free. So you would expect product segmentation along the lines of core counts, dram channels, etc but not really between for example high end desktop/low end server because there would be a gradual mixing of the two markets. And it turns out the market is still competitive because Arm and AMD are driving a bus through some of those super high margin products that are only artificially differentiated from the lower end parts by the marketing department or some additional engineering time that actually breaks functionality in the product (ecc, locked multipliers, iommu's, 64-bit MMIO windows, etc).