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Comment by rafaelturk | Hacker News Reader

I'm still puzzled: Ampere list show at least 16 SKUs, imagine dealing with 16 different fabs, circuits, packages, specs, sales.

This feels like Intel marketing shenanigans from 2000's..

Having this insane number of different is a common marketing stuff, that nowdays I found hard to belive ads any value to a business. Moreover, given the current Fab issues, and supply constraints keeping a clean & simple fabrication process, distribution, and sales pipeline actually is an advantage.

Can't help remembering Steve Jobs famous quote when re-gained controll of Apple. 4 producs Matrix: Consumer, Pro vs Portable, Desktop.

Again kudos for Apple: That continues to design one or maybe two CPUs per year and heavily optimizes, efficiency, scale, logistics, etc.

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Isn't it the same CPU, just differing numbers of cores with different clock rates and different TDPs? I'm assuming that at least part of this is just due to binning, where the best samples are 3Ghz high core count, and the lower samples have cores fused to disabled and run at a lower TDP/clock.

Its not like Intel, in that Ampere does not seem to play games with memory channels/clock, PCIe lanes, different accelerator features, etc.

>Isn't it the same CPU,

Yes. They are on the same die. ( Or may be two Die, Altra and Altra Max ) You can tell or guess by the same amount of Memory Chanel and PCI-E Lanes across the line up.

And also bin for yield as well. So you just fuse off the parts / core with defects.

Apple does multiple SKUs, too, such as the 7 or 8 core GPU options for the M1. They can otherwise mostly get away with fewer SKUs by currently not really having either a budget option of the M1 (eg, no 6 core CPU variant) nor a high end option. That'll almost certainly change as they roll out Apple silicon to the iMac Pro & Mac Pro.

The fewer SKUs therefore isn't a result of impressive engineering but rather impressive profit margins. They just don't care about salvaging mostly-working silicon as much as Intel, AMD, and now Ampere.

> The fewer SKUs therefore isn't a result of impressive engineering but rather impressive profit margins.

It also signals impressive yields to me. The M1 is very small, only around 120mm^2. I’m sure we’ll see more than two SKUs when the new MacBooks launch.

Possibly but then why did they bother doing the 7-core GPU variant? The GPU section of the M1 isn't that much bigger than the firestorm CPU core section, and any one of those GPU cores is smaller than one of the firestorm CPU cores. Unless it's something weird like they just can't fuse off 1 or 2 of the big CPU cores?

But regardless Ampere, AMD, and Apple are all fab'd by TSMC, so they'd all be seeing similar enough yields.

> I'm still puzzled: Ampere list show at least 16 SKUs, imagine dealing with 16 different fabs, circuits, packages, specs, sales.

That's probably not what's happening though -- more likely, this is 1-4 different chips with aggressive yield management and some cores being fused off for the most entry level SKUs.

I’m fairly certain that the entire lineup is only 2 different die designs. One for the 128-core “Altra Max” and one for the 80-core. The rest of the SKUs are just cut down and binned versions of the overall dies. This is an extremely common practice. Both tiers even use the same 4926-pin socket so there is plenty of supply chain commonality between them.

What a weird comment to make.

Is extremely complex process to just `cut` a die, latter needs packaging. Why Ampere a company just entering the market is creating such a complex pricing matrix?

Is it really that complex of a process? They're just disabling groups of cores, not taking a hacksaw to it. They package it the exact same way as the full dies.

What is so complex about their pricing? This is completely normal stuff, and simpler than both AMD and Intel.

They don't literally cut the dies down, they just disable features by programming them in the factory.

It feels like you didn't even bother reading the table.

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