If the volume of duds is low so will availability of these; but when you're making something by the million even a few percentage is enough to be worth selling.
Also these probably are less duds in the sense of being faulty, than duds as in being the dies that need the most power for a given frequency target; and thus are just the bottom X percent of the yield curve.
Regardless of process being used or manufacturer, there will always be defective chips due to flaws in the initial silicon wafer.
The other side is that while these are binned parts, the disabled portions may in fact be fully functional. The reason for their binning could be that they don't conform into the power profiles set by Intel's spec for power consumption. For the mobile world, being off a little by at say 18W vs 15W does matter. Ditto for chips that are fully functional but don't reach as high of clock speeds to adhere to the greater spec.
In reality, there are likely very few dies outside wafer defects that are not being sold after 5 years of 14 nm experience.
I wonder if people ever check and perhaps Intel just does this in software somehow. Because that's a lot cheaper, and people buying these machines are probably not that curious, and then the rest of the hardware probably can't run the 'real' chip anyway.
It would be interesting to be able to unlock certain features (ECC, VT-d, clock multiplier) or disable various artificial market segmentation restrictions (Socket 1151 Xeon E's on standard Z390 motherboard etc.).
This claim that weaker chips are "salvaged chips" is nonsense that's still propagated because a certain type of person (Intel or AMD, or even QC, fan) is unwilling to accept the reality that companies may in fact want to sell different products at different prices. It seems to be psychologically damaging to them to believe that Intel want to charge them more for 8 fast cores than 2 slow cores, so we get this salvage nonsense as a defense mechanism.
It's interesting to note that a company like Apple, that produces a run of maybe 350 million A9s seems to have very little need to bin them, to deal with salvaged parts, or to otherwise play these sorts of games. It's almost as though, once you design the chip, modern manufacturing is good enough to ensure that practically every chip meets those specs within a narrow band...
(I am sure that Intel DOES look for golden chips that it can sell at much higher prices -- design for 4.5GHz, and upsell anything that substantially exceeds this. But that's very different from claiming that there's a huge pool of chips that only reach 3GHz, or for which only 2 of 6 cores are working, or whatever; and that this pool of chips is being downsold.)
Your lack of knowledge about how this works is matched only by your confidence that you understand something you transparently do not.
Apple's chips are smaller and they charge high margins for their vertically-integrated products.
Intel do indeed sell CPUs for however much they feel like, but when they introduce a new product lower down a range based on the same die then it will indeed be using binned parts. There's no shame in it and no need to get weirdly defensive and deny the whole process / start attacking straw men.
If Intel has a shortage of i3 chips and a shortage of Pentium/Celeron chips, they are going to sell the stock as i3 chips first because there is a higher margin.
As stated by multiple articles and news sites, as well as intel press releases, "There are supply issues at 14nm" So intel will concentrate sales on high margin parts. It would be illogical to assume intel is taking in a lower margin to a market that is strapped across the board. Therefore, these are more likely lower rated chips that take more power to operate @ a given MHz, or have defective features that are disabled.
Am I the only one who thinks the pricing is disgusting?
That Celeron should be like $60 tops, the Pentium $75. A mobile i3 should start at a maximum of $150, the i5 like $225 and the i7 around $300. That would be pricing in line with full desktop chips, these small chips should be even cheaper.
You can buy a full laptop with 8GB RAM and SSD under $350 using recent gen CPUs (AMD and Intel).
Those are prices for me and you. OEMs will pay much much less. I have seen motherboards with integrated Atoms selling in retail at prices lower that the price of the processor alone, based on Intel's site.
I believe these are deterrent prices. Their are probably OEMs that demanded parts this low end and Intel is pricing them this way because it uses a piece of silicon that's probably capable of a lot more and so a much higher margin. OR given the PCIe 2.0 lanes, this may be its own separate spin of silicon which means it's actually made in fairly low volume and thus justifying the price.
The prices are a bit disgusting but mobile parts do cost more because of the power optimization. What I can't understand is that the Pentium is $161 but for a slightly higher clocked, a bit better graphics and 2MB more L3 cache, the Core i3 model is $281. Then the next up is a 4 core i5 for only $16 more?
All this doesn't matter for anyone but OEM because these cpus are soldered to motherboards and can't be purchased alone like desktop CPUs.
It's fair to say that Celeron will be close to half the performance of the i3, making it on-par with Intel's current $70 parts, so I agree this is pretty ridiculous pricing. A 3 year old A6-series will probably outperform it at a fraction of the price.
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yeeeeman - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
I highly doubt that after 5 years of 14 nm experience they still have lots of defective chips that can go into this lineup.DanNeely - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
If the volume of duds is low so will availability of these; but when you're making something by the million even a few percentage is enough to be worth selling.Also these probably are less duds in the sense of being faulty, than duds as in being the dies that need the most power for a given frequency target; and thus are just the bottom X percent of the yield curve.
Kevin G - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
Regardless of process being used or manufacturer, there will always be defective chips due to flaws in the initial silicon wafer.The other side is that while these are binned parts, the disabled portions may in fact be fully functional. The reason for their binning could be that they don't conform into the power profiles set by Intel's spec for power consumption. For the mobile world, being off a little by at say 18W vs 15W does matter. Ditto for chips that are fully functional but don't reach as high of clock speeds to adhere to the greater spec.
In reality, there are likely very few dies outside wafer defects that are not being sold after 5 years of 14 nm experience.
drexnx - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
probably a high proportion are fully functional with features fused off for segmentation purposesnico_mach - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
I wonder if people ever check and perhaps Intel just does this in software somehow. Because that's a lot cheaper, and people buying these machines are probably not that curious, and then the rest of the hardware probably can't run the 'real' chip anyway.29a - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
I imagine the various surface mount components on the bottom control what features are functional.Kevin G - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link
At one point, it was indeed software drive locks. Intel experimented with the ability to unlock features via licensing.https://www.anandtech.com/show/4621/intel-to-offer...
It would be interesting to be able to unlock certain features (ECC, VT-d, clock multiplier) or disable various artificial market segmentation restrictions (Socket 1151 Xeon E's on standard Z390 motherboard etc.).
name99 - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
This claim that weaker chips are "salvaged chips" is nonsense that's still propagated because a certain type of person (Intel or AMD, or even QC, fan) is unwilling to accept the reality that companies may in fact want to sell different products at different prices. It seems to be psychologically damaging to them to believe that Intel want to charge them more for 8 fast cores than 2 slow cores, so we get this salvage nonsense as a defense mechanism.It's interesting to note that a company like Apple, that produces a run of maybe 350 million A9s seems to have very little need to bin them, to deal with salvaged parts, or to otherwise play these sorts of games. It's almost as though, once you design the chip, modern manufacturing is good enough to ensure that practically every chip meets those specs within a narrow band...
(I am sure that Intel DOES look for golden chips that it can sell at much higher prices -- design for 4.5GHz, and upsell anything that substantially exceeds this. But that's very different from claiming that there's a huge pool of chips that only reach 3GHz, or for which only 2 of 6 cores are working, or whatever; and that this pool of chips is being downsold.)
29a - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Apple is a different kind of company they don't make their own chips they just design them.Spunjji - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Your lack of knowledge about how this works is matched only by your confidence that you understand something you transparently do not.Apple's chips are smaller and they charge high margins for their vertically-integrated products.
Intel do indeed sell CPUs for however much they feel like, but when they introduce a new product lower down a range based on the same die then it will indeed be using binned parts. There's no shame in it and no need to get weirdly defensive and deny the whole process / start attacking straw men.
digitalgriffin - Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - link
It's all about supply/demand/marginIf Intel has a shortage of i3 chips and a shortage of Pentium/Celeron chips, they are going to sell the stock as i3 chips first because there is a higher margin.
As stated by multiple articles and news sites, as well as intel press releases, "There are supply issues at 14nm" So intel will concentrate sales on high margin parts. It would be illogical to assume intel is taking in a lower margin to a market that is strapped across the board. Therefore, these are more likely lower rated chips that take more power to operate @ a given MHz, or have defective features that are disabled.
EliteRetard - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
Am I the only one who thinks the pricing is disgusting?That Celeron should be like $60 tops, the Pentium $75.
A mobile i3 should start at a maximum of $150, the i5 like $225 and the i7 around $300.
That would be pricing in line with full desktop chips, these small chips should be even cheaper.
You can buy a full laptop with 8GB RAM and SSD under $350 using recent gen CPUs (AMD and Intel).
Example:
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lenovo-Ideapad-330s-15-...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lenovo-ideapad-S340-15-...
CharonPDX - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
It's not that laptop chips are "small" therefore cheap to make - it's that they're power-optimized, meaning they're more expensive to make.yannigr2 - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
Those are prices for me and you. OEMs will pay much much less. I have seen motherboards with integrated Atoms selling in retail at prices lower that the price of the processor alone, based on Intel's site.cygnus1 - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
I believe these are deterrent prices. Their are probably OEMs that demanded parts this low end and Intel is pricing them this way because it uses a piece of silicon that's probably capable of a lot more and so a much higher margin. OR given the PCIe 2.0 lanes, this may be its own separate spin of silicon which means it's actually made in fairly low volume and thus justifying the price.AshlayW - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Yes, it's disgusting. In fact I was going to comment about "throwing up in my mouth" at the prospect of a 2/2 over 100 bucks.taisingera - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
The prices are a bit disgusting but mobile parts do cost more because of the power optimization. What I can't understand is that the Pentium is $161 but for a slightly higher clocked, a bit better graphics and 2MB more L3 cache, the Core i3 model is $281. Then the next up is a 4 core i5 for only $16 more?All this doesn't matter for anyone but OEM because these cpus are soldered to motherboards and can't be purchased alone like desktop CPUs.
Samus - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
It's fair to say that Celeron will be close to half the performance of the i3, making it on-par with Intel's current $70 parts, so I agree this is pretty ridiculous pricing. A 3 year old A6-series will probably outperform it at a fraction of the price.AshlayW - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
7nm AMD Mobile, we need you. This price gouging is appalling.Samus - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Considering how dependant their current IPC is on cache and clockspeed...damn those are going to be some f'ing slow chips...R3MF - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link
do these chips use the comet lake U die (6c lpddr4x) or the comet lake Y die (4c whisky lake refresh)?and do the security fixes that both versions get include a secure H/T implementation?
clara2020 - Monday, February 17, 2020 - link
Intel still leader, thank you for this amazing content Anton Shilov.meilleur https://boutiqueaz.com/tech/comparatif-hi-tech/pc-... pc portable gamer.