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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

> This is called binning

Binning is any kind of sorting by silicon quality. It can refer to sorting by the number of "good cores" you get, but it has usually meant sorting by speed grade or other characteristics.

> and how all manufacturers build their line of products.

Having identical functional units you disable is a great yield maximization strategy if it fits your product. Most semiconductor products are not in this category-- it's mostly just multicore CPUs and GPUs that have a lot of identical cores and relatively small uncore.

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> It can refer to sorting by the number of "good cores" you get, but it has usually meant sorting by speed grade or other characteristics.

There are multiple "bins" between "good core" and "failed core". The first one runs flawlessly at the nominal speed while the second one can't run within the envelope defined. There are cores that can run overclocked, cores that will fail above a certain frequency, and cores that are so broken they won't work on any clock.

That's why, for instance, some Cell processors left the factory with 6 SPUs and Sun's first Niagaras had SKUs with only a small number of cores.

Yes I agree with your comments, I over simplified. However, regarding "most semi", it depends if we are talking about market value vs # chips. The CPU/GPU market is really much larger in $$$ than low-power embedded chips. Although it's changing again with AI inference...

Agreed on binning, but all DRAM and all NAND are fault tolerant. Between all memory, GPU and GPU-like, and CPU....I have all but mobile, or about 70% of the market.

Yes, memories too, are a good mention.

> I have all but mobile, or about 70% of the market.

In dollars, maybe, but there a whole lot of units of things that you cannot build a meaningful deactivation strategy on.

Sure! It is a huge mix. ASICs don't, mobile cannot, and you can't really just ignore.

But there are also other tricks, like redundant vias, or SRAM spares, which do make 'yield' less listed by defects than it might first appear.

FPGAs too, though I don't know how widespread this technique is:

https://www.eetimes.com/altera-uses-redundancy-to-boost-yiel...

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