No two processors are the same, even when they belong to the same line of products. R"lated: How to O"erclock Your PC With Intel XTU And because we have no way of knowing which CPUs overclock better, if you end up with a better one, you will win the “silicon lottery.” For instance, one Core i9-10900K processor may overclock to 5GHz, while another may never go past 4.5GHz. Put simply, processors that are fabricated from the center of the wafer overlock the best. In addition, the chips from the center often have better thermal performance and clock speeds, resulting in a lot of overclocking headroom. In other words, they are of better quality than the chips on the edges of the wafer. On a silicon wafer, chips that are printed closer to the center have fewer defects.
Among many factors, the relative placement of a chip on the wafer can determine a CPU’s performance proCPU's
Chips that perform worse than expected are binned out into lower-end products, and better chips are packaged as high-performance parts. K series CPUs are identical to non-K parts except for one difference: they can achieve higher clock speeds.Īfter cutting the wafer, CPU makers test chips to make sure they have satisfactory performance. A good example of this is the Intel K series. Where manufacturers can categorize worse-performing processors into lower-tier products, they can also sell CPUs performing better-than-expected as separate products. This process of repurposing the CPUs because of inherent defects is called Binning.īinning can go both ways. So, if there are defects in a Core i5, Intel may decide to sell it as an i3 with the defective cores disabled. It is only after the cutting phase that CPU makers classify different chips according to their performance. For instance, a low-end dual-core Intel Core i3 and a mid-range quad-core i5 processor are made from the same wafer. Because of these defects, manufacturers get around 70% to 90% yield.Ī thing to note here is that no matter the classification of a processor, all processors are manufactured from the same silicon wafers. During the production of the wafers, defects spread along the surface of the silicon disk, an unwanted side effect of the fabrication process.
Not every inch of a wafer can be used to form chips.
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