this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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I remember when Intel tried to do this with their chips and people absolutely lost their shit.
Tesla's popularity is on such a downtown, people won't lose their shit but instead just go: "Ah, Musk is doing dumb shit again."
Tech folks lost their shit. Joe Schmoe consumer arguably didn’t notice. They were just looking at the manufacturer sticker on their palm rest.
I believe Intel is on track to do it again.
I mean, they never stopped, did they? This is what chip binning is and for chips, it makes a lot of economical and even ecological sense (since a chip where the yield is such that only 6/8 cores function properly can be sold as a lower-tier product without issue instead of being scrapped, for example)
It's also what made overclocking so popular.
Unless you and GP are referring to something else, of course. Wouldn't put it past Intel to be nefarious 😅
I read an article recently that talked about enabling and disabling cores on the fly.
I think chip binning is perfectly reasonable.
Chip binning is great because it creates less waste, cheaper product and more profit for the manufacturer. Rare case of where everyone seem to win.
But there was this case where intel was designing chip that could be sold at lower price and more cores could be unlocked in software for a price.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/facepalm-of-the-day-intel-charges-customers-50-to-unlock-cpu-features/
When IBM did this with mainframes it launched Amdahl into existence. His machines were basically the same machine except they were unharnessed.
Are you sure you're not confusing this with the concept of "binning", which is a pretty standard practice for chips?
You manufacture to a single spec, expecting there to be defects, then you identify the defective units, group them by their maximum usability and sell the "defective" units as lower end chips. IE, everything with 24-31 functional cores gets the "extra" cores disabled and shipped as a 24 core, everything with 16-23 functional cores gets shipped as a 16 core, etc