cpu core counts (was: iPad)

[Jarod Wilson]

On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 11:44 PM, Dan Ritter <dsr-mzpnVDyJpH4k7aNtvndDlA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 07:48:35PM -0400, Mark J Dulcey wrote:
>>
>> But in these cases, the disabled parts of the chip may have been turned
>> off for a reason. They don't work at all, they work but fail under some
>> operating conditions such as extreme temperature, or the chip overall
>> fails to meet its power consumption and thermal specs if all the cores
>> are enabled. Then again, they may be perfect chips that the company is
>> selling off as the less capable versions because they don't have enough
>> of the not-fully-functional parts to meet demand at the reduced price.
>> So... is your 3-core CPU an honest sale if the fourth core is defective
>> but a ripoff if the fourth core works?
>
> My cousin the CPU ceramic packaging engineer says that yields are always
> being pushed on the lines to the point where finding 1/4 dead chips is
> perfectly normal, and it's quite rare that they dump fully armed and
> operational chips as inferiors.
>
> He's surprised that AMD and Intel haven't announced 5-core
> spoilage variants of the new 6-core chips... yet.

I wouldn't be surprised if they just took them and sold them as
quad-cores. One production line for both the 6-core and 4-core chips,
less marketing hooey. :)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org