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Topic: Why does AMD want to lock cores in CPUs. (Read 718 times)

legendary
Activity: 2006
Merit: 1028
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July 07, 2013, 09:49:24 AM
#4
Because they're Hard Core?
legendary
Activity: 4494
Merit: 3178
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It's so that they don't have to throw out the entire chip (and the resulting profit) if one of the cores fails a stress test. Instead they just disable the faulty core and sell the chip at a discount. They keep some of the profit, and consumers get low-quality chips at correspondingly low prices. It's win-win. Sure, you can always unlock the bad cores, but if you actually try to use it at 100% load for any length of time, you're going to run into problems.

This is standard practice in the semiconductor industry. Some people say they're actually disabling perfectly good cores, but that makes no sense as that would mean they're selling perfectly good products for less than full-price. Where's the profit in that?
legendary
Activity: 1512
Merit: 1042
Death to enemies!
1. They are defective and does not function properly.
or
2. They need to make cheaper crippled CPUs to sell for lower price.
member
Activity: 65
Merit: 10
 Why does AMD want to lock cores in CPUs? whats the point of doing this?
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