Apple produces one A series chip for the iPhones every year. How does that work?
Even Apple is susceptible to it. But Apple doesn't sell chips, they sell devices and they can eat the cost for some of these. For example if a chip has 2 bad cores instead of selling a 6 core version Apple is probably just scrapping it.
Being able to sell bad batches of product takes some of the sting out of failure, and past a certain point you're just enabling people to cut corners or ignore fixable problems. Having a tolerance of 1 bad core means if I think I have a process improvement that will reduce double faults but costs money to research and develop, aren't I more likely to get that funding?
We'll start to see high-binned next-gen Apple Silicon parts moving to the MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro, and lower-binned parts making their way down-range.
That could make sense for Apple; the M1 is already ~1 generation ahead of competitors, so axing a bit of performance in favor of higher yields doesn't lose you any customers, but does cut your costs.
Plus, they definitely do some binning already, as mentioned with the 7 vs 8 core GPUs.
In silicon manufacturing, the inefficiency is actually pretty low specifically because of the kind of binning that Intel and AMD do, that GP was complaining about. In a fully vertically integrated system with no desire to sell outside, the waste is realized. In a less integrated system the waste is taken advantage of.
In theory capitalism should broadly encourage the elimination of waste - literally every part of the animal is used, for instance. Even the hooves make glue, and the bones to make jello.
Apple probably does the same strategy PS3 did: create a 1-PPE + 8-SPE chip, but sell it as a 1-PPE + 7-SPE chip (assume one breaks). This increases yields, and it means that all 7-SPE + 8-SPE chips can be sold.
6-SPE-chips (and below) are thrown away, which is a small minority. Especially as the process matures and reliability of manufacturing increases over time.
You can read more info on this forum post: https://community.amd.com/t5/processors/ryzen-5900x-system-c...
Thank you.
The only exception to this are Panasonic microwaves.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-microwave/
Granted, a microwave with a half broken M1 in it would be awesome.
To be fair, is there anything particularly revolutionary that could be done with a microwave (short of "smart" features)? They all function the same: shoot specific frequency energy into the (possibly rotating) chamber. It would make sense that the guts are just a rebadged OEM part.