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Comment by disillusioned | Hacker News Reader

>(the 10300-10900k are all the same chip with different parts turned off due to manufacturing errors)

Wow. Is this a relatively new phenomenon, or something that's been the norm in processor mfg for a long time? I know that the Ks were usually just binned/higher tested chips so they'd unlock those and charge a premium for them, but the idea that they're disabling parts of the die and separating the chip offering that way is crazy to me. Are the parts being disabled redundant or are they reducing the instruction set space? I don't know anything about how any of that would work.

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This price differentiation actually occurs in all products and companies. Look at SaaS, it's all the same software product but features are selectively enabled for higher-paying customers.

Something that's different between software and hardware such as chips are that the chips that have things disabled are done so because those disabled parts actually don't work. If you only yield 2 out of 4 cores, it's easier to just make it a dual-core CPU rather than throw the chip away.

I remember hearing 10 years ago that Phenom x3 was a 4 core part that always got a dead core in manufacturing (:

So no, nothing new under the sun.

I remember hearing something about the Cell processors on Playstation 3's being the ones with manufacturing errors. The 100% good ones were supposedly sold to the US military. I realize that second part was probably just a myth. Who knows, maybe it was all an internet myth! The PS3 was released in 2006, so the idea itself is not new.

A few years ago we had fun with the AMD HD 6950 graphics card. From what I remember, it was more popular than the higher specced 6970, so they simply detuned 6970s by deactivating shaders. Tools were then published by enthusiasts to enable those shaders and some manufacturers even added features to help you do it (mine had a little switch to reset the firmware if you screwed it up).

https://www.zdnet.com/article/upgrade-your-radeon-hd-6950-to...

The disabled parts are the broken parts.

insert the ohio astronauts meme

wait, it's all just binning?

it always has been.

;)

It's been done for as long as I can remember.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning

Iirc, early Celeron were often just Pentiums with defective (and disabled) cache

Edit: https://www.anandtech.com/show/568/2

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