WurthWhile t1_jdjbx22 wrote
Reply to comment by rx_bandit90 in Nvidia Lifts Some Video Encoding Limitations from Consumer GPUs | Nvidia quietly boosts the video encoding capabilities of its GPUs. by chrisdh79
Somebody else already answered it, but not why that happens.
A lot of the cost to make tech things such as computer processors is the r&d. Often the end result is a single product. For example Intel May have only a single processor created from all of their r&d. That processor needs to be sold out an average price of X. Except not everybody has X. So what they do is they artificially limit some of those processors to be significantly weaker, and then sell them for significantly less than X, but still way below the cost to actually make an individual chip. Some processors are limited to a little weaker and are sold at X, some are not limited at all and perform after absolute theoretical peak, and are sold significantly above X.
For example AMD used to sell eight core processors with all eight available, or 2 or even 4 disabled. The ones with chorus disabled were sold for less money. Some people figured out how to unlock those processing cores because those chips had the chorus disabled only in software. Now they're typically physically disabled.
RAM is another common one. RAM sticks that are rated for a faster speed or the exact same as the ones rated for a lower speed, the difference being the higher speed ones have been tested and guaranteed to run at a higher speed. The lower speed ones might crash due to manufacturing defects if run at a higher speed so they advertise them at a lesser speed and charge less money for them. In a way the additional cost is simply paying for stricter quality control.
wanabeagirl t1_jdmabuy wrote
A lot of that pricing started out as a result of binning.
Making CPUs is really hard, especially with larger die sizes, so you're likely to end up with defects in some of the chips you make. But since the defect might only affect some of the cores on the chip, you can just disable those cores and sell it is a 4 core chip instead of an 8 core.
Eventually the manufacturing process gets better and better and you have fewer and fewer chips with actual defects. But you don't want to cannibalize sales of your higher end chips, so you just artificially disable cores on some chips to keep your market segmentation intact.
They would also do similar things with CPU clocks as what you mentioned for RAM- where they would test each CPU and the more stable ones were sold as higher speed chips, and the less stable ones as lower speed.
hibi_chan t1_jdjsc8b wrote
Another similar product in this regard is all LED/OLED screens. The more expensive screens have a lower percentage of dead pixels, the less expensive, more.
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