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[Dan Ritter]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 07:48:35PM -0400, Mark J Dulcey wrote:
> 
> But in these cases, the disabled parts of the chip may have been turned 
> off for a reason. They don't work at all, they work but fail under some 
> operating conditions such as extreme temperature, or the chip overall 
> fails to meet its power consumption and thermal specs if all the cores 
> are enabled. Then again, they may be perfect chips that the company is 
> selling off as the less capable versions because they don't have enough 
> of the not-fully-functional parts to meet demand at the reduced price. 
> So... is your 3-core CPU an honest sale if the fourth core is defective 
> but a ripoff if the fourth core works?

My cousin the CPU ceramic packaging engineer says that yields are always
being pushed on the lines to the point where finding 1/4 dead chips is
perfectly normal, and it's quite rare that they dump fully armed and
operational chips as inferiors.

He's surprised that AMD and Intel haven't announced 5-core
spoilage variants of the new 6-core chips... yet.

-dsr-

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