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Silicon Lottery store closing
- 0x4863A0 5y agoCan someone explain what this is/was?
- CivBase 5y agoLooks like you could mail them a CPU and pay them to upgrade the thermal compound under the IHS and optionally test it to determine maximum stable overclock parameters. It looks like they also binned high-end CPUs. For those not familiar, that means they tested each CPU to determine its maximum stable overclock, then re-sold them with a markup on the fastest ones.
- w-ll 5y agoLooks as if they bought CPUs and did their own benchmarks/binning and resold them based of their measured performance.
- Tuna-Fish 5y agoCPUs sold under the same name can have substantial differences in their overclocking headroom. Back when variation was larger, purchasing a new CPU was thus participating in the "silicon lottery", at least if you wanted to OC. The siliconlottery site used to buy a whole lot of CPUs, test them, determine their max stable overclocks, and then sell the good ones at markup (and the not-so-great ones at a little below market). If you wanted the very fastest cpu money could buy, and didn't want to start binning cpus yourself, they were the best option. The market has largely died out because the manufacturers have improved their binning and reduced variability to the point that the best chips are no longer meaningfully better than the average and OC rarely makes much sense anyway. In many ways, this is good for customers, but it is an end of an era.
- avree 5y agoWho?
- chacham15 5y agoSo, for those of you that dont know what this is a simplified explanation is: silicon lottery does a few things. 1. You can buy processors which have lower defect rates and are therefore much better at overclocking than others of the same type. 2. You can get extra services like delidding which is normally done to improve thermal transfer making it easier to overclock and keep the system cool. The benefits of these have been decreasing over time and with chip shortages as well, the lottery is closing down.
- froggertoaster 5y agoI feel like this service came several years too late. The overclocking community seemed much bigger 10-15 years ago.
- mrb 5y agoHow about 20 years ago? Remember the Celeron 300 MHz which could be easily overclocked +50%(!) to 450 MHz?
- cmsj 5y agoHeck yeah, and it supported SMP. I had two of them running on an ABit BP6 motherboard as my Linux workstation. Good times.
- Sebb767 5y agoI'm pretty sure the community has grown, simply by the increase of number of users alone. Extreme overclocking, which this service caters to, seems to have shrunken, though. Probably because of dimishing returns.
- 55873445216111 5y agoAMD and Intel have gotten much better at pushing the stock CPU frequencies up to the actual process limits as compared to 10 years ago. Also the various Turbo boost features now automatically push it even further towards the limits when there is thermal headroom. Therefore, there is hardly very much headroom left on the table anymore for overclockers. In 2009 I overclocked my i7 920 from 2.66GHz stock to 4.2GHz fully stable with custom water-cooling. More recently I have used i7 7700k and Ryzen 5950X under custom water-cooling and manual overclocking gets you less than 10% at most. Hardly even worth it. Just keep the CPU cool and let the built in boost features work.
- snuxoll 5y agoThere’s also the issue that newer cores run much hotter than ever before. The chiplets in my new Ryzen 7 5800X are so small that even my custom water loop can only do so much with the temperatures as there just isn’t enough surface area for thermal transfer. I was honestly worried that I was repeatedly messed up the mount of the CPU block, thermal paste application, or that one or both were just bad when I fired up HWInfo64 and did a burn-in test; my old Ryzen 5 1600X didn’t get near as hot on a 240MM AIO when overclocked as the 5800X does doing normal boosting on a 360+240mm custom loop.
- withinrafael 5y ago"Delidding" is the process of removing the lid--the shiny exterior metal integrated heat spreader (IHS)--and replacing the thermal interface material (TIM) between the CPU die and the spreader. This is done in hopes to reduce operating temperatures and increase overclocking potential. This is similar to the process of scraping off the stock TIM on a retail heatsink. This procedure can be difficult to perform; Silicon Lottery provided a premium service for interested customers. Silicon Lottery also provided "bin" identification services [1] via frequency tests and sold desirable highest quality/lowest defect chips (hence the company name, I presume). Processor "binning", overly simplified, is a process of testing and sorting processors into various bins (e.g. best performance, lowest defects vs. decent performance, some defects, etc). That explanation doesn't do the process justice but should give you an idea. [1] https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics
- dcow 5y agoYep and with Intel shitting the process bed all they can do is bin their existing stuff better, add some more aggressive boosting, and sell it as i9. They're essentially stuck "overclocking" their own chips.
- techrat 5y agoTo the point to where you often could get better performance UNDERCLOCKING what Intel sold you. Often to the amount of 1% less performance but also 15% less power draw.
- awesomeusername 5y agoRIP. It was a great service and really well run.
- shadilay 5y agoI had a feeling they we're going to close a month ago when I checked and they didn't have inventory.
- Grustaf 5y agoDoes anyone know what they did with the "losing" chips, the ones they bought that didn't turn out to be positive outliers? Seems very tricky to get this financially viable, since 90% of chips will just be average. At least I assume so?
- cortesoft 5y agoResell them as average?
- Grustaf 5y agoYeah, but will they even make a profit on those? I mean presumably people who just want a normal processor would prefer to get it from a more well known shop, so they can't even charge market price for them. Plus their "normal" chips are actually worse than your average market chip, since they removed the good ones. But maybe the margins are high, so they didn't lose money on those.
- Sebb767 5y agoIt seems the resold them cheaper [0]. Unfortunately, all prices are zeroed, so it's hard to tell by how much and whether it was below retail. [0] https://siliconlottery.com/collections/cometlake/products/10900kf49g?variant=32994307702870 https://siliconlottery.com/collections/cometlake/products/10... (see the description, 100% of CPUs reached this).
- banana_giraffe 5y agoI'm not knowledge on CPU prices, but looking at their prices from January [1] , it looks like you could save around 10% off retail if you used them to get the "losing" chips. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210116175309/https://siliconlottery.com/collections/cometlake https://web.archive.org/web/20210116175309/https://siliconlo...
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoI still see prices at https://siliconlottery.com/collections/all https://siliconlottery.com/collections/all Intel Core i9 11900K @ 4.9GHz Boxed Processor $ 519.99 Intel Core i9 11900K @ 5.0GHz Boxed Processor Sale price $ 499.99 Regular price $ 579.99 Save $ 80 Intel Core i9 11900K @ 5.1GHz Boxed Processor Regular price $ 779.99 Intel Core i9 11900KF @ 4.9GHz Boxed Processor Regular price $ 499.99 Intel Core i9 11900KF @ 5.0GHz Boxed Processor Regular price $ 559.99 Intel Core i9 11900KF @ 5.1GHz Boxed Processor Sale price $ 639.99 Regular price $ 759.99 The discounted ones are the only ones not marked sold out.
- gjsman-1000 5y agoOverclocking, in my humble opinion, was always a sign of inefficiency from a manufacturing perspective. If the manufacturer was nearly-perfectly efficient at manufacturing and binning, almost none of their chips should have any overclocking headroom because they came out at their limits from the beginning.
- xondono 5y agoThe original margin for overclocking was in fact a result of being efficient. Let’s say you build 1000 chips and bin them in two categories 900 came out near peak performance. Then you get orders for 200 of the top performance item, and 700 of the low tier. What are you supposed to do? Build another 7k chips and store the high performing ones? The obvious solution, pick 600 top performing chips, relabel them as low tier, sell them at lower margin, and if needed you can start the next batch. From computer accesories to top tier processors, the problem is not in profit margins, is in cashflows.
- acchow 5y agoThis sounds like a company that is very bad at predicting demand. Presumably in 2021, Intel can predict relative demand between its product bins quite accurately?
- sudosysgen 5y agoThe fact is that the demand for the high end is always much lower than successful chips and they need to have a sizeable gap to justify those chips. Also yields and bins improve significantly over a product cycle so it's not set in stone.
- xondono 5y agoPredicting demand is only really useful if you can tailor your yield function and doing so provides savings. Intel doesn’t choose to make X number of top bin and Y number of the next bin, they try to optimize for as much of the top bin as they can manage. A lot of 6 core processors have actually 8 cores, but two of them had flaws so they got disabled. The conclusion of this has been AMDs strategy, where everything from low tier CPUs to server grade use the same design, and products are built after binning the chiplets.
- zamadatix 5y agoSilicon Lottery was great. Perhaps oddly I never used them for any of my desktops rather a few laptops. I'd get the top binned CPU I could buy from them and tweak the clocks so that single core was OC'd to the max and multi core was relatively close to stock but undervolted. This kept fans from going nuts without having to sacrifice a great deal of performance. I really wanted to get my 5950X through them but the shortages at the time made it hard enough to get one at all and they eventually gave up even trying to list them.
- gautamcgoel 5y agoWhile it's sad that they are closing, there is a positive take here: there is less need for such a service, because A) there is less variation among processors, so you know pretty much exactly what you are getting and don't need third-party binning to get top performance, and B) Intel has improved their Thermal Interface Material (TIM), so there's no need for delidding. Basically, CPU performance increased and grew more consistent, so you don't need a third-party provider to pick out the good ones for you.
- heydabop 5y ago> there is less variation among processors Definitely, to the point where it feels like they're breaking up their product line to further narrow this variation, or at least that felt like the case with the i9-10850K vs the i9-10900K.
- bick_nyers 5y agoI think the demand is also just incredibly low. Overclocking is already a niche thing, but adding the idea of binning into it narrows it down much, much further. You have two options, one is you buy a bunch of CPUs yourself, find the best one, then sell the rest (likely at a loss), or two you pay a premium for a performance gain that is not noticable in every day tasks. Combine that with how Ryzen performance scales right now, the FCLK, or memory clock. Most people definitely don't find memory overclocking to be worth the trouble (plus it is insanely hard to do beyond what the Ryzen calculator tells you to do).