For newer manufacturing nodes like TSMC's 7nm, the gap is more likely to be larger. Depending on how intensive and accurate the binning process is-and how mature the manufacturing process is-the gap between the 'best' and 'worst' functional chips from a wafer may be relatively small.
Meanwhile, the functional but perhaps not quite as good chips are harvested and sold as lower tier parts. Thus, the best chips usually get sold as the fastest, most expensive parts-the Core i9-9900K, Ryzen 7 3800X, or RX 5700 XT. Chips with impurities or errors don't fully work, so modern processors build in redundancies and some portions of the chip can be disabled to produce a working chip-but one that's not as fast as a fully enabled chip.Īfter each wafer gets cut into individual chips, each is tested to determine how good it is in a process called binning. My understanding is that chips from the center of the wafer tend to be 'better' than those near the edge, so they may require less voltage to hit the same clockspeed, or they may run at higher clockspeeds at the same voltage. There are impurities in the wafers used for making CPUs and GPUs, and these can lead to errors or differences in performance characteristics. Modern microchips are made using large (300mm) silicon wafers, cut from a large silicon crystal cylinder.
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