Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

The thing that keeps me questioning is the "its using binned parts" dialogue. I'm sure _some_ parts might be discards from the iphone 16, but the volume they had at launch to me suggests that not the story. I've read somewhere that they made/budgeted for 5 million laptops shipped this quarter/half. but if they are made from binned CPUs, that suggests at least 4-7% yeild loss for the original iphone CPU.

Bear in mind thats this 4-7% loss only counts dies that have just one broken CPU unit. There are many other failure modes as well. That just seems very very high.

I've also not really seen any official channels that support this assertion, even apple insider seems sceptical that this is true: https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/04/07/incredible-macboo...

With my logic hat on, Apple contracts chip manufacturing, so I would have assumed that rejects and failed parts would be recycled at source. I would imagine that apple only pay for parts that pass QC. So I suspect that actually these chips are either leftovers (at best) or specifically manufactured using the old tooling.

> Bear in mind thats this 4-7% loss only counts dies that have just one broken CPU unit. There are many other failure modes as well. That just seems very very high.

Is it? I thought the average for lastest-architecture chips was around 5%.

Sorry I was unclear about what "very high" meant.

From what I can see, one can expect about 80-90% yield per wafer, the bit that that doesn't make sense is that the "binned" narrative implies that of those broken parts of the wafer, 25-50% are usable with just one GPU disabled.

To me that sounds wrong, and far too high.

I would expect 80% of the failures would have only one core not pass QA.

I remember back in the day it wasn't that unusual for intel to sell quad core CPUs and dual core CPUs that exactly the same hardware-wise, but the dual-core ones didn't pass the QA to be sold as a quad-core.

In fact they sold many functional quad-core CPUs as dual-cores with 2 cores disabled and you could unlock the extra cores with some magic if you got lucky and got one that passed the quad-core QA.

I had thoughts along similar lines, but there are other possibilities - it could be the older CPU models are built either on older lines and/or with more mature, higher yield processes, and this offering could in part take demand pressure off of top-of-the-line process M5/M4 parts.

> The thing that keeps me questioning is the "its using binned parts" dialogue.

How is this different from any other computer product?

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