It seems like it would be trivial for them to reduce quality control and have customers just “deal with” chips that aren’t as stable. How come they aren’t doing this?
It seems like it would be trivial for them to reduce quality control and have customers just “deal with” chips that aren’t as stable. How come they aren’t doing this?
First of all, they do do this. The AMD “tri-core” chip was a quad core that failed QA. Then most slower chips are in fact from faster chips but also failed QA and have to be underclocked.
However, the real answer is that because if you get a bit flipped, while most things are recoverable, there’s a good chunk at the hardware level that is unrecoverable. You’ve seen this with blue screens. Chips like that wouldn’t sell. Bluescreens and panics aren’t acceptable to people.
This is the correct answer right here. The process is called “chip binning.” https://www.techspot.com/article/2039-chip-binning/