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Faulty Chips Might Just be 'Good Enough'
Ritalin16 writes "According to a Wired.com article, 'Consumer electronics could be a whole lot cheaper if chip manufacturers stopped throwing out all their defective chips, according to a researcher at the University of Southern California. Chip manufacturing is currently very wasteful. Between 20 percent and 50 percent of a manufacturer's total production is tossed or recycled because the chips contain minor imperfections. Defects in just one of the millions of tiny gates on a processor can doom the entire chip. But USC professor Melvin Breuer believes the imperfections are often too small for humans to even notice, especially when the chips are to be used in video and sound applications.' But just in case you do end up with a dead chip, here is a guide to making a CPU keychain."
If ever a story was appropriate for Slashdot.
Don't throw away those "almost perfect" CPUs! Give them to needy people in the third world!
So they can remark them and sell them back to us...
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
And for a long time so. "Audio RAM" is the euphemism.
If I remember correctly, digital answering machines use "reject" RAM chips that aren't suitable for data storage, because minor dropped bits in a recorded message aren't discernible.
Didn't I read this a few days ago... seems old... Like I already read it...
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As much as I applaud the decision to save the environment, would this not cause problems for things such as bughunts? Would they sell two tiers of chips, those for developers, and those for consumers?
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
They create a batch of processors; from that batch they test a percentage for speed. Some batches perform better than others and get higher ratings. Sometimes your batches are all really good, but the market requires something cheaper, so you underclock some good processors and sell them for a lower price.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
Yes, Microsoft decided not to support CSS2
In soviet Russia, Linux compiles YOU!
I'd rather my chip works as advertised.
Actually, the supercomputers used for warfare and conflict analysis at the Pentegon and the CIA use these rejected chips.
In addition, they are used in the so-call "Star Wars" missle defense system prototype.
Although these chips don't actually work, the results are often good enough for their purposes.
Chipmakers aren't environalists are they? Is that how you spell environmentalist?
It may seem that there's a basic linear line between over-the-top quality control and cost and more economical quality control and cost, however one has to think that if it turns out that these chips are more likely to have defects in them and in fact do in the future, how long will costs remain low? The chip will still be useless and will have to be replaced, added to that the cost of making the returns from the customer/store and then the possible customer dissatisfaction with the company's quality which could result in a lost sale in the future. Will it actually be cheaper in the long term?
This story has been updated to note that Melvin Breuer's research was supported by the chip industry
Looks like this is the excuse the industry has been wanting in order to justify selling shoddy parts. Of course, doesn't this happen already? I may be cynical, but doesn't any consumer expect their product to be free of defects (or at least what they deem accepetable).
Then why not have analogue processors instead of digital processors. Seriously - they're much faster than digital switches.
The only reason for moving to digital switches was accuracy - the cost of the first digital bitflipper processors was far more expensive than valve technology was in 1950s and 1960s. And that really was the only reason for changing to digital processors.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
...for Dell to make even shittier machines than they do now. I could see them putting out an entire line of machines based on 'good enough' CPUs. They could call it "Sloptiplex."
LCD manufacturers routinely put defective screens on the market, on the premise that a dead pixel here or there "won't be noticed". Too bad, because consumers do notice and do tend to return the product equipped with the dodgy screen, only to be told that it's "normal".
In short: computers suck...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Xilinx offer EasyPath option by testing for a customer-specific application. Customers use EasyPath customer specific FPGAs to achieve lower unit costs for volume production once they know their design is fixed and no longer requires the full programmability of an FPGA.
The CPU vendors are already doing a 'sort and grade' operation, when they label processors. Have been for years. When the yield from the fab is lower-grade, the dies get packaged and labelled as lower-speed parts.
Then the Overclockers come in and ramp the speed back up, and claim 'the faster chips are a ripoff' and complain that 'Windows is always crashing.'
Just wait till we start applying the "Good enough for cheaper goods" philosophy to food.
Micron started a group over 15 years ago that tests RAM chips at all stages of production that fails testing.
When I worked there it was called the "Partials Division". This group invented the "audio ram" market. They have a wide ranging sorting and grading process. It is called "SpecTek" I believe now. I sometimes see low end memory modules with SpecTek Ram.
12 years ago, I was production technician in a Surface Mount Assembly division that shared a building with Partials. We used to assemble memory modules and even video cards that used "PC grade" chips from the partials group. Everyone said they were good enough, but personally I have always steered clear of them.
The last year I was at Micron, we had a lot of discussions with NEC, Intel and some Russian Fabs to provide the same services to them. We tested a couple million chips from these companies in tests. Never did hear what the end result was.
Or just sell them as Pentium Pros.
Many of the chips fail inspection prior to going into the package, and then some more fail functional test after that. Probably more than half the price of a chip is the factory itself and the R&D work which is amortized over so many zillions of parts, and much of the rest is all the handling, packaging, shipping, and middlemen. I'd guess less than 10% is per-part materials and labor.
Therefor throwing away a $2 chip during production doesn't cost $2. It's only worth $2 by the time the customer pays for it.
Sure you could sell the defects at some discount, but it's only worth the trouble for some high volume part like RAM where defects are easily useable, and definitely NOT a part where the impact of some particular defect in the end user's application could be really hard to characterize (like a CPU).
In the FUTURE, single core processors will be dual core processors where one side didn't pass quality control. Someone will eventually figure out how to hack the chip to use both halves anyways, and the market will be flooded with cheap dual core chips that don't always work. Remember, you read it here first.
Unknown host pong.
I can see it for RAM, but for processors, I don't think so.
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Though, you would probably have to make sure that certian important data for an audio or video clip are stored in *good* memory. Or else you could run into problems where a clip doesn't know where to end.
But, what are the odds that a null terminator gets messed up in meao90efghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ÇüéâäàåçêëèïîìÄÅÉ
<<ERROR: Unexpected EOF >>
There is a reason for throwing out those chips! Maybe it's true that _most_ human ears wont notice that the least significant bit has been flipped in a über-noisy phone recording for a digital answering machine, but what if it was the most significant? That would make an audible "pop".
Ok, so maybe for non-critical equipment in the "use-and-throwaway" category. But this will not bring us cheaper hardware, just less functional hardware. Those chips are _literally_ going nowhere slow.
If you've ever had to debug something that turned out to be flaky hardware, you KNOW it's a PITA. If anything, awareness should be increased when it comes to the really cheap brands. They aren't always very stable, but people sometimes go for the cheapest RAM anyway, and then complain to ME when it doesn't work. There actually is some connection between what you pay, and what you get. Argh.
I'm done rambling now, thanks for waiting..
With great numbers come great responsibility!
I'm sure I read something, a long long time ago, that mentioned that Celerons were "faulty" versions of the Pentiums (and a comparison was made that the Durons were made as Durons, and weren't chips that were taken out of the garbage bins)
Usually thier LE and SE models have certain branches and pipelines already disabled. Usually these disabled pipelines are damaged in some way.
I know its offtopic, stupid moderators. I was just replying to his post :O
In soviet Russia, Linux compiles YOU!
The manufacturing process errors that cause parts to be rejected vary greatly from part to part -- they don't all fail in the same ways. Additionally, some defects are acceptable for some applications and not others. It would require a great deal of time and effort to identify the exact nature and extent of each defect found in each part, and then to match that particular part to an application that will tolerate its fault. While it is conceivably possible, it would be very difficult to implement this sort of system. The only real exception here is for memory devices in applications that are universally fault tolerant (media). Processors and other devices do not lend themselves well to this because of the wide variety of fault types.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
...seems he must have left his keys in the car.
What?! You're kidding me right?
Apart from some hard-wired devices (simple sound clip recorders) or downclocked low-end devices, I don't see how defective chips can be used. The article suggests that the occasional error is OK for audio and video, but how do you ensure that the faulty chip never has to handle code, memory pointers, configuration files, hashes, passwords, encrypted data, or compressed data. I suspect that modern-day audio and video datastreams are becoming more fragile as they carry more metadata, highly compressed data, DRM, software, etc.
Something tells me that the manufacturers that use semi-defective chips are going to lose all their savings on product returns, warranty costs, and technical support. Given the low cost of most consumer electronics chips and the high cost of service labor, I doubt they will want the hassles of unreliable products.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A bit error here, A bit error there. Pretty soon you're talking about real crashes.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
...They'd already be doing it.
Please remember that this is the same industry that came up with the 80486SX when they were having lousy yields on 80486DX chips. If these processors had any utility, trust me, they'd find a way to make money off 'em.
Apparently the overclockersclub stressed there server too much. Now I'll never know how to make a keychain out of CPUs...
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
Military Grade
Consumer Grade
Radio Shack
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Damn, I wish I hadn't wasted all those old processors by scrubbing gum out of my carpet and then throwing them out, I could have used them to make perfectly useful key chains...
A "deffective" chip to do my taxes thanks. Home tax software will only increase in popularity. Stuff like adding numbers matters. Thats a "mission critical" piece of software there, not to mention these chips would be useless to any distributed computing project or databases or work in Excel for example.
Bad idea.
Who could resist broken chips? Especially the silicon-flavoured?
Condense them into a big clump on a plate, and I will megaherzedly dig into them while watching penguins fly through my broken windows. You just gotta love those intelligent clusters of beowulf penguins!
Ah! My God!
Too many embedded links to geeky stuff.
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
While I agree that analog processors probably hold some promise, there is one large issue with them: heat. A major reason why processors get hot in the first place is that after each cycle the state is returned to a neutral position, which usually means grounding the gates to discharge them. This waste energy has a large conversion over to heat. Analog processors can really be thought of digital with multiple states, instead of two. This means that while more work can be done, there is larger values of charge to disapate.
What has always had my curiousity for why it has not been seemly worked on is "reversable" chips. There are essentially two sets for every mechanism and the system toggles back and forth. The discharge of the old system is used to drive the new mechanism; thus, a lot of wasted discharge is conserved for reuse. Reversable chips are reported to generate far, far less heat. I have heard that Intel and others know about this, but it is simply a better immediate investment because consumers are happy paying for the current line of toasters.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Intel, AMD, and other chip manufacturers must make a premium for their high-end chips to make a profit. They discontinue a speed grade once it hits a certain price point because it's not profitable to sell them that cheaply. I seriously doubt they're going to want to release even lower-margin, bargain chips that further undercut their more profitable high-end chips.
you do not know how disabling works
you are correct that motorola disabled FPU on 68xxx chips and sold them without fpu and sold non disabled chips at premium
you are correct that intel disables debugging hooks on intel chips and sells non disabled chips at premium
you are coorect that memory chips have disabled fields
you are corrrect to imply that non MP chips are sometimes crippled versions of MP chips. MP chips like titanic (titanium) are, by legal edict made to trade partners, illegal to disable MP features electronically, but other MP capable chips have been crippled and sold into uni-cpu channels.
but you do not know SHIT about how disabling works.. electronically gates are blown and cannot be repaired
no technology exists to repair these blown microfuse-like circuits
you are correct that dual chips will be tested and failures dropped, but the cores will be designed to fanout to only a single cpu package. they will not mount it in a dual package
for your prediction to be true (and it is not), the number of cpus would have to approach 8 or 16 cpus destined for a single package with only one or two disabled
the market would not stand for it, so the chips would actually be designed as 10 cpus of which 8 are left intact or 18 cpus of which 16 are not electronically disabled. but in that scenario the wiring would only go to 8 or 16 remaining cpus with no way to enable dead ones and no way to access the lines.
you are an idiot basically.
At least Intel didn't tell us that the Pentium was "good enough" with its floating point division error (even though it actually was 99.999% of the time).
English is easier said than done.
Clive sinclair did this with transistors.
TI used to have the driveway to their offices composed from very out of spec transistors. Clive got a digger to dig up a few tons, had them sent to England. His staff then graded them into a,b,c (I think) and they were resold to hobbyists or used in his early amplifiers.
I read about this in the book 'clive sinclair and the sunset technolog'
He also used half working 32k ram chips as 16k ones in the zx spectrum.
We have a difficult enough job getting machines to do what we want, without pseudo-academics like this giving manufacturers yet another excuse to compromise on quality.
a re/story/0,10801,71140,00.html
Once bad chips are allowed out the door, it can be difficult to know where and how they'll be used.
NASA for example, has a whole team of engineers scouring eBay and other outlets, just to find vintage electronic parts for the Space Shuttle program!
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardw
If a 2000-styled election cliffhanger happens again, perhaps we'll have USC to thank for it.
Reminds me of a story I heard from my high school physics teacher. He had a friend in the military doing electronics. One big part of his job was to measure resistors because military specifications required that devices have a very strict tollerance. They wouldn't use anything which was more than 1% outside of specs, and they would simply throw out the rest of the resistors they bought. So my teacher's friend would simply take all these resistors to which he had accurately measured the resistances, and sold them to the local radio shack, since they liked being able to buy resistors that were within like 2-3% of the indicated resistance (I'm not an electrician, but I believe 5% or so is considered an acceptable tollerance for general applications?), and they got them cheap, and the guy made some money since his investment was 0, since as far as the military was concerned, he was simply selling trash. Couldn't something like this be done with chips, isn't there some market for chips that are 99.9% good?
The AMD XP to MP 2100 mod.
Now, in reality Celerons have a lower cache, lower bus speed and overall lower clockspeed. As I remember, because of this the core doesn't have to pass as high a standard as the current Pentium offering.
I'm sure there are others who would offer better knowledge on this.
The other version was that the coprocessor had the highest failure rating for the chip fabrication. So on these chips with a failed copressor, the coprocessor was turned off, but the rest of the chip was still usable.
I vaguely remember this whole practice was described in a computer book my friend was reading, because I remember a joke the author told about computer salesmen. Unfortunately I only remember the joke, not the useful info from that book. (This joke comes from the days of small computer shops)
Q : What's the difference between a computer salesman and a car salesman?
A : The car salesman knows when he's ripping you off.
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Would you really want to fly into airspace where the servers in the air traffic control centers are run by processors that are good enough...
Or bank with a bank whose data center processors are good enough...
While we're at it, let's get rid of process/product qualification - this could save thousands of parts for each digital chip out there. We could also get rid of burn in and any kind of stress testing, since we obviously wouldn't care if we had any parts out there that were 'walking wounded'
Hell, we could even get rid of any kind of functional test...
Seriously it's already difficult enough to test and get reasonable levels of coverage on current processors already - if the chips are going to be used in ANY kind of mission critical applications (or even in my home PC) I want a chip that is as good as current test processes can guarantee it to be.
How irritating would it be to have a processor with a hard fault in that caused errors on excercising a certain block of logic.
People have already mentioned that quite a few products already use defective ram chips, and engineers desigining various products are aware that parts like these are available, and are (or should) be using them where ever possible to reduce cost.
It might be interesting to go through some analysis to see if the increase in DPPM (and subsequent increase in returns) would be low enough to not completely cancel out the gains you would get from increased yields.
You think that's important?
Well, I heard that IE7 is going to have bad CSS2 support.
Someone should put that on Slashdot rather than this nonsense about chips or something.
Love the updated notice? Slashdot, you care to update yours to refelect this minor detail or do you just like playing along?
Quack, quack.
"OH MY EYE... I'm not supposed to get cpu pins in it!"
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Basically, the problem is this. With mechanical and analogue devices, most of the time you know that if you change the inputs a small amount, the outputs will change a small amount.
But digital devices are chaotic. Change one bit in the input, and the output is likely to be radically different. One bit in the wrong place on a Windows system can make the difference between Counterstrike and a BSOD.
You can use substandard devices for some applications; dodgy RAM, for example, can be used to store audio on, and it would work just as well for video framebuffers. But you could never put anything programmatic on it; that has to be perfect.
(IIRC, they do recycle faulty wafers. One of the ways is to scrape the doped layer off and turn them into solar cells. I don't know if they can use them again for ICs, though.)
Maybe that explains why these chips are not entering the U.S. National Memory Championships.
If you look at what the "big ticket" items are in the US economy, electronics and medicine are up at the top of the list.
And the reason for this is, as you get closer to perfection, it takes more and more of an economic cost, in terms of money or resources or time or effort. For a computer or a medicine to go from 90 percent to 99 percent utility means a ten fold increase in price.
Thats why the constant quest to have "perfect" electronics and medicine is driving up the prices of these things to the point where normal people can't afford them. If we could accept that we didn't always need new, perfect, shiny medicines and electronics, it would put them in a sane price range.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Most chips that you buy have defects in them, especially memory. For years now chip manufacturers have been building redundancy into very regular structures like memories such that if a whole column is bad they use a spare one built for that purpose on the chip.
Chip companies are not throwing away money, most chips off the fab are inspected by high-precision cameras, then sumarrilly electrically tested before being bonded to a package (save money on not packaging ones that don't pass this test) Then tested and burned in according to a test that will exercise as much of the chip as possible.
Then there's the whole binning process where if the chip runs too hot you sell it as a lower freq chip, if the floating point unit doesn work sell it as one without it (remember 486DX), these days if one of the processors on a multi-cpu chip doesn't work, well it's now a uniprocessor.
how well that work with the P54 Floating Point rounding error.
People may not notice the problem, but if they ever find out it's there, they'll want it fixed, better to throw out a chip in the fab, than replace the product in the market.
Faulty Chips can be used to generate "true" random numbers.
If a 2000-styled election cliffhanger happens again, perhaps we'll have USC to thank for it.
Gee, sounds like you flunked out of USC.
In any case, the idea isn't to put non-working components in your home computer. Instead, the goal is to use some rejected components for other uses where they can still succeed.
A good example is your favorite HDD. Does it have bit errors? Yep! But can you tell? Nope! Because the supporting hardware is able to detect and correct the errors without you ever knowing about it.
So why not apply the same principles to other computer components? The short answer is cost. It costs money to build more fault-tolerant devices. But the paper advocates reducing the costs of such fault-tolerance, and using the 2nd class componentry only where one can.
Learn to RTFA, and maybe USC will take you back!
This theory seem simplistic to me.
It seems that what he proposes is to write new specs for each bogus chip.
1. You would design chip C1.
2. Then you build chips, supposedly as per C1 spec.
3. Then you check your chips against C1 spec
4. if not the same, then you write spec C2 according to what the buggy chip does
5. Now you can sell working C2 chips
In theory that works, except that it would be impossible to write a spec from the manufacturing tests results.
It might work for simple chips, such as Memory chips but anything like a graphic chip is going to be too complex to handle.
Each chip might fail in a different way, so you would have to classify the chips according to how they fail, you might get hundreds of them. If you get chips failing all the same way then its true you might find a use for them, but if they all fail the same way, then It means there is a problem in the fabrication process and I would rather fix the process.
Writing those manufacturing scan tests is not easy, they have to run quickly, be very compact...
Each test you add cost more money to run, it might not save you money in the end
..to match my defective Windows operating system. Is it me or is the quality of EVERYTHING going to hell. Pretty soon we'll be living in carboard houses and driving aluminum foil cars.
...is to _test_ them.
A chip is no good for ANYthing unless you know exactly what is wrong with it. It might not work AT ALL in a specific "audio application."
By the time you've tested a chip enough to characerize its defects, so that you know they are not going to interfere significantly with the very specific way it is used in a specific application, you've probably added so much cost that it's probably more expensive than a perfect chip.
In fact, you've gone away from the notion of "interchangeable parts" and have gone back to the idea of craftsmen carefully matching parts that fit.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Releasing multimedia software products is already hard enough without having to take into account that the frickin' CPU might not work as intended.
I dread to think how much extra strain on development and product support that would put if people's CPUs suddenly decided to do random things in the middle of a calculation.
HE might not think that multimedia applications wouldn't notice if the CPU sometimes flaked out, but as someone who develops multimedia applications (ie: games) - I'm shocked at his naive and belittling attitude. The example of "one red pixel in a million" is utterly horrific - one faulty pixel - EVER - is one pixel error too many. If any manufacturer ever releases such hardware, I will write code that specifically prevents my applications from running on it.
Next he'll be suggesting that it's okay for automobiles to "randomly" fail to start, brake pedals that fail one in a thousand presses, pacemakers that miss a couple of beats a minute and wings to "occasionally" fall off airplanes.
The article proves nothing to me exacept that retarded hippies shouldn't be allowed to speak on the subject of engineering - the entire point of the field is consistent, reliable, predictable results.
Lets get a better view on this issue by comparing it to something else that allows faults. LCD monitors. Do you know how agitating it is to have dead/frozen pixels on your screen?
What needs to occur here is more refined chip manufacturing process. Lets improve the situation instead of lowering standards.
but anything like a graphic chip is going to be too complex to handle.
Depends...
Graphics chips these days have multiple pipelines, and are shipped in variants with different numbers of pipelines. If you can build a board that lets you use (say) any two pipelines out of a 4-pipeline chip, then you can use more of the defective chips. Similarly, if you're making MP3 chips, and their FM radio or LCD subsystems fail, you sell them to APple to put in the iPod Shuffle...
The thing is, defective chips are already sorted into bins like this. Processors are binned by clock speed... buy a low-speed CPU and it could well have come from the same run as its higher-speed cousin. Memory has mechanisms to allow for a certain number of bad cells. It wouldn't surprise me at all if some 2-pipeline GPUs are 4-pipeline versions that failed the 3rd or 4th pipeline.
I don't know how much headroom is left.
Couple of corrections of some of the messages:
Yeah... chips with failures get the market (and it is not 2.99999th world.. it is 3.000001 and going further from the 1.000001st that produces them). So when you study electronics and you buy an expensive memory that turns out to fail, you just "wire" the memory to avoid using that part of the memory.
a "most" significant bit is just a matter of perspective.
However, we are loosing the point here... it is the target market for CPU key rings
However, yeah, a CPU is a more delicate issue, either way, the failure depends of your point fo view, if you need the part for your application... keep doing the keyrings. if not... well, why not.
Save the sand! (that's what they are made of, aren't they?)
The best test of CPU/ram perfection I've seen is "Prime95", running under Windows. As I understand it, this program computes huge series where the each bit is derived from all the other data in memory, and the answer is already well known. Any time any bit, anywhere in memory doesn't hold for an extended period of time, the failure is known. All my (high quality homebuilt) computers pass it. Many cheapo computers do not, which includes most of the randomly crashing computers I see that are not consipicuously infected. I've purchased expensive, top-brand low latency RAM that didn't pass this from a couple of vendors; one exchanged the memory for perfect with no hassles, the other claimed that no memory could be expected to always be completely perfect, and wouldn't take action despite a 'lifetime warranty'. I've purchased plenty of cheap RAM that passes Prime95, and expensive RAM that fails it. Prime95 is the only test I know of that definitively shows how close to the threshold of overclocked imperfection most semiconductors are.
For most applications, the specific resistance isn't all that pickey. 5% is often good enough. Also, it's often not even the absolute value that's important, but the relitive value that's important. You have a device with 3 channels each with a 1k resistor. It doens't matter that the resistors are 1k, it matters that they are all the same value, and somewhere around 1k, etc.
However that's not true of the digital world. It is important that my processor gets the right answer to a calculation everytime, all the time. It is important that the data stored in RAM is always accurate. If any of these fail, well it can fuck things up and you can't predict what. Maybe it's the least significant bit of a sample in an audio file and I never know. Maybe it's a bit in the address of a jump in a driver interrupt and it brings the whole system crashing down.
So while I'm not really worried if all the resistors in my powersupply are precisely to spec because who cares if it produces 11.5v instead of 12v? I am VERY concerned that my CPU might give me anything ever but a completely accurate and predictable result.
Also, it can make a difference in the analogue domain too. The military is pickey for a reason. If a TV fails, no big deal. If an F16 fails, that's a big deal. However on a more mundane level you'll find milspec parts in use. I built a headphone amp using all 1% (or better) milspec resistors. Why? Well, they sound better. The design (metal film instead of carbon) has better audio characteristics, their resistance changes less with temperature, and the closer matched they are, the closer the output of the channels of the amp are.
I think the only answer is improvements in both recycling and manufacturing techniques, because this has to be costly when you can't deliver on an order and your competitor does. But how wasteful is it to just toss 'em? They're going to end up in a landfill within 10 years anyway. If they're sold to consumers, there's a strong probability that a whole computer containing the defective chip will end up taking up space in a landfill, rather than just the chip.
It seems to me that the cost and energy going into manufacturing a complete unit around a defective chip with a shorter useful lifetime is a lot more wasteful than just tossing the part, no?
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
circletimessquare?
is that you?
And all manufacturing processes fail from time to time, microchip manufacturing is no exception. In a lot of 1000 chips, you might get 1 or 2 where the silicon wafer wasn't right to begin with, or one of the layers was a millionth of an inch too thick, and that causes a problem where the chip should have twiddled a '1' when it really twiddled a '0'. These are big problems, and could mean the difference between your heart monitor working or not working. The goal of testing is to find these problems early and get rid of them before it reaches a customer, not to sell defective shit to them anyway just to make another buck.
I got this from the guys in the fab I used to work at. It's the only one I know.
Did you ever hear how a microelectronics designer paints a room?
1. Put a paint shaker in the middle of the floor.
2. Put an open can of paint in the paint shaker.
3. Turn it on. Run out of the room very quickly. Everything in the room is now covered with paint.
4. Wait until the paint dries.
5. Cover every part of the room you really wanted painted with masking tape. Leave the floor, switch plates, etc. uncovered.
6. Put an open can of paint remover in the paint shaker.
7. Turn it on. Run out of the room very quickly.
Everything not covered with masking tape is now clean again.
8. Remove the masking tape.
9. Remove the paint shaker and sludge from the floor.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
here is revolutionary new idea, that might chance the software industry radically:
...umm.. minor imperfections, not visible to the human eye, just one in, say 2 million bytes.
instead of pushing software developement cost in astronomical heights, consoder the following:
software might be good enough for most jobs, even if it contains a sort of
so why don't we ship software in this form?
Only morons moderate based on a sig.
19 March 2020
Retired USC professor of Electrical Engineering-Systems, Melvin Breuer, died in his home due to a faulty pacemaker.
Shock rang out through the computing industry as the the Breuer family attempt to lay blame on the faulty pacemaker against the manufacture. Astute Slashdot readers have stepped forward with evidence of papers written by Melvin Breuer showing the professor as an advocate for the use of low-cost faulty computer chips in consumer electronics.
Unfortunately, the research did not forsee the consequence of allowing flawed chips onto the global market. An investigation reveals the manufacturer of the pacemaker purchased the pacemaker chips from an overseas source. The foreign company purchased low grade chips earmarked for exclusive use in consumer audio and graphics, and resold them as perfect chips to be used in mission critical applications, such as pacemakers.
Hundreds of manufacturers have initiated recalls on thousands of mission critical consumer and industrial products that have used chips from the foreign supplier, ranging from pacemakers to automobiles to net enabled teddy bears.
bad hardware is the most frustrating thing ever for a pc repairshop/engineer to diagnose because you can spend hours looking for bad drivers, corrupted OS etc because of intermittant faults only to find out the ram was bad and there was nothing wrong with the OS in the first place, it costs the customer more than if they bought good hardware in the beginning
Same deal with Celerons and P3s. When the L2 cache on the P3 doubled from 128k to 256k, it almost doubled the die size. Since chip defect rate is proportional to chip area, there were a lot of P3s with one of the two L2 banks with defects. So Intel just disabled the entire bank and sold it as a Celeron with 128k of L2.
In other news, flights would be much cheaper, if plane manufactures stopped Quality Control.
Interesting concept. Should consumers be lured into buying stuff that "should work, most of the time"? The fact that it's not "critical" (as in audio devices, etc) doesn't change anything. I think consumers already settle for too little.
There are some interesting research points around this (like error-recovery in multi-GHz logic chips, taking into account some temporary or permanent internal failure), but that's another idea entirely. But using defective chips? No way! Even if the failure is not apparent right away or undetectable - well, that means that we *don't know* what exactly will be wrong with that chip. All we know is that it has some fabrication defect - it's not in the state of working "the way we know it should work", and thus its failure rate becomes undecidable. Critical field or not, I want my chips to work. Period.
Anyway, if that ever happens, I think the Microsoft team will be very pleased. Unreliability as a core feature of some products - a dream come true. I'm kidding, but what I'm not kidding about is that it might create a "precedent" where it's ok to ship products that didn't pass the quality check. Someone joked about selling them to the 3rd world countries, but it's not really funny: it might very well happen. Why wouldn't it?
...Sinclair Spectrums appeared to have twice as many memory chips as they needed because Sinclair bought chips where half of the chip was faulty as they were a lot cheaper and then sorted them by bank.
Second, even if all the bits of the sample are wrong, an answering machine probably samples at 8k Hz. If one sample has the wrong value, then the pop will be 0.125 milliseconds long, so not really that bad.
A single sample error will sound like the click in this wave. But many digital answering machines use lossy compression optimized for the periodic sound of the human voice. A bit error in one of those may spread out over a whole speech packet, producing audible pops like in this wave.
In addition, even if the audio storage is lossy, there would need to be either a second certified defect-free part to hold metadata where in memory each message starts and ends, or an error-correcting code applied to the metadata.
I don't like the idea of more flawed chips entering the market, but this story caused an interesting idea to pop into my head.
Lets say a CPU runs great, but fails on a coupla instructions. Why not just compile for it sans those instructions? For this to make any sense, there would have to be plenty of similarly flawed chips to work with though.
Blogging because I can...
I just wasted 20 hrs recovering a hard disk that had just a few errors that no one would notice.
Anyone here old enough to remember the 386SX? The idea of not throwing away chips with minor imperfections is clearly older than the writer of that article.
Oh well, what the hell...
Probably the same moron that needs a microwave with a barcode reader on it so they can just read the barcode from a box to get the warming instructions. See the current wired for the piece of garbage thats refered too. Yeah it just takes oh so long to read the instructions on a microwaveable meal.
For example the NAND flash used in your flash drive will likely have a few bad blocks coming from the factory. The controllers software has to map those out so they are never used. This along with error correction can allow use of bad parts to a large extent.
I think some people really go out of their way to write these things, but comic relief is always welcome in the computer society. ;)
On a similar note, dead hard drives make good paperweights, and everyone knows Windows CDs make good coasters, and shrinkwrap presents a choking hazard to pets and children under 5, and and you can always tangle cords up to make large balls, rope, chains or whips or whatever. Manuals for miscellaneous programming languages are recyclable, CRTs can make effective anti-electronic equipment electron guns and goodness knows what people will think up for uses for a dead speaker...
Move sig now.
I did RTFA, and prior to posting. But indeed, you make my point for me.
The HDD, being sold as a component, contains all of this engineering to ensure that I don't experience ANY digital errors to the extent possible. It's hardly as if Seagate were selling a drive intended to work only 50% of the time.
USC by the way, is below my standards as of today.
I just wasted 20 hrs recovering a hard disk that had just a few errors that no one would notice.
Interesting counterpoint. But assuming the errors in this case related to unimportant data, aren't you still glad that your drives aren't deciding on your behalf which data are important?
If I recall correctly - Sinclair used 'sawn off' 68000 chips for the QL, and used 'faulty' chips for the ZX81 and Speccie. So this is not a new idea, just one that has been 'remembered' in the same way most 'new' idea's are presented in computing. (Good example being p-code and java byte code - java byte code is just like p-code but more sexy - I guess it must wear a shorter skirt).
Got a link to someone using that term? I've never heard of it before, and it doesn't look like Professor Google has either. (honestly I didn't go past the first few pages of crap about real audio .ram files).
The ZX Spectrum came with faulty on board RAM, only the good half of the chips were enabled.
There were articles describing how to re-enable the faulty halves and essentially double your ram, albeit maybe unreliable.
a bad 512MB DIMM stick on my desktop had fsck stuff my entire ext3 filesystem into lost+found. so even though i had a separate ro,noauto /boot partition, the kernel loaded then panicked when no / was found.
perhaps they can use all those "good enough" chips on the new "trusted computing" deally.Serenity now, insanity later.
It says tossed due to minor imperfections in transistors. many wont do the job it was made to do with that minor imperfection. be dangerous (fire hazard, shortage etc) AMD sells them as Semprons if thbe ath XP or 64 has damage to the L2 cache or 64bit extensions transistors. they just disable the faulty part and sell without them enabled. in my opinion minor imperfection is cosmetic , like wrong color, scratches, minor bent pin. Structural/soldering problems/faults are a major fault.
Micron [http://www.micron.com/] (you know, big memory manufacturer) does exactly this through their SpecTek subsidiary [http://www.spectek.com/]. They sell less than perfect memory to consumers that need less than perfect performance (ie RAM for your Furby), as culled from defective chips on their manufacturing line.
There have been moments in DRAM history when devices were made that were configured in some way during final test to work around bad spots. IBM did it for a while in the 1980s, I think. But with 90+% yields, it's not worth the added switching you need on chip to allow that. You could, in theory, use heavy ECC to tolerate a substantial defect rate. That's how CD-ROMs work, after all. But it's not necessary yet.
For a while, there was a market for DRAM with bad spots for use in telephone answering machines.
This is an idea that resurfaces periodically in the semiconductor history, but historically, the yields have always come up to acceptable levels.
The author says that they should stop throwing away all of their partially faulty chips, and then later says that they recycle some of them. They aren't throwing all of them away. Secondly, I for one appreciate their adherence to perfection. A few messed up connections might not matter at one second, but the effect becomes exponentially more significant versus a functional processor of the same make over time.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Sir Clive Sinclair used defective RAM in the ZX Spectrum way back in 1982. They were chips with only one bank working, but the computers were wired to only use that one bank.
Old Computers Museum
quote: "To keep the prices down Sinclair used faulty 64K chips (internally 2 X 32K). All the chips in the 32K bank of RAM had to have the same half of the 64K chips working. A link was fitted on the pcb in order to choose the first half or the second half."
Remember, many of the best ideas have already been used.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
... I was working with a gentleman that's job was to come up with new interpolation routines for CCDs to help bring the yield up.
What he came up with (and demo'd) was a way to restore a 20% defective chip with dropped columns to 95% accuracy.
Think of that- your brand new 1mp 1000$ digital camera has 20% of its columns defective, but with this algorithm they'll release it to you for the same cost... and you'll (supposedly) never know the difference.
I was also fortunate enough to see a perfect 16mp array come back from test. The chip was immediately 'disappeared'- everyone knew it was impossible to make a CCD chip with 0 defects. Most have very advanced mapping algorithms, but still this was downright amazing. 16 million perfect photosites with just small offsets.
Anyways, that one never made it into a camera, either. Heh.
I can see it now: Faulty Code Might Just Be 'Good Enough'
Let see - credit card transaction, banking, health and safety, alarm, etc can use those minor malfunction....yeah, until someone get those crazy bills, or someone get kill in the process
Get them lawyers ready
+1 FLAGGR wants to be in this joke.
MOD FIRSTBORN CHILD OF PARENT DOWN
-1 kaens made a lame moderation joke.
kaens.blogspot.com
I made one of those almost 5 years ago from the 486dx2/66 chip in my first PC. Put the sucker in a vice and sheared off the pins with a cutoff toll, then drilled the hole. I may have ADD, but I'm not completely fucked - I had safety goggles on at least. But, I never thought to get a patent! ;-)
You are good enough for the chip!
In all seriousness, I recall seeing a story in print where the Soviets (before their dissolution) were copying US processors. Because the quality of the result were so poor, that some "instructions" were "defective" and coders had to "code around" the defective instructions...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The very clear symptoms are:
Knock knock.....
BANG BANG BANG!! Open the fscking door it's the USA forces!!!
Squeek.... Whaddayawant this is Europe for fsck's sake.
HE'S RESISTING ARREST BEAT HIM UP AND FSCK HIS RIGHTS. Yessir.
You have a beard.
I didn't shave yet.
SHUT UP FSCKER. You wear a dress.
I just got outa bed.
LIAR YOU'RE A COMMIE RELIGIOUS EXTREMIST.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
This has been in practice in Asia for quite sometimes already. Basically, you can buy it out of box, but no warranty. Since in Asia, they are not used to the concept of "return purchased product" or "service", it really isn't a problem for people there. Personally, I would rather pay extra $50 to buy a HDD that lasted my box's life cycle (for me it's about 4~5 years).
one reason that it is not practiced in North America because users tends to return "crap" back to the manufacturers. To these serviceless companies, it really it's a pain! it really is a give and take. Devices passed the tests might just be lucky that it did. Devices did not pass the tests might just be unlucky. you can still buy defective product after all those intensive tests. or you might buy a less product that never fail after that test run.
just my 3c
...that most of "savings" from defective chips manufacturers will get from users that WON'T BOTHER TO RMA PRODUCTS AFTER A COMPLETE FAILURE. After all, if chip manufacturers will consistently produce crappy chips, customers won't have an option to get a better brand, the quality will be dropped across the board.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
That's pretty standard even now.
If I recall correctly, at least at some points the Celeron has been a P2/P3/P4 with failed cache turned off.
I think the same may have been true of the Duron - an Athlon with bad cache that's disabled, and/or one that won't run at the full Athlon bus speed.
I *know* it's something LCD manufacturers do (in the sense that every LCD panel is cut from a "faulty" sheet in such a way as to minimise the number of faults on it), and I'm pretty sure RAM manufacturers do this as well.
After all, *ALL* CPUs fit this pattern in at least one way - clock speed. AMD don't go and make 2GHz Athlon XPs, 2.2GHz versions, etc. They make "Athlon XPs", test them, and sell them at the clock speeds they're capable of running reliably at. My understanding is that the yield curve is also a major factor in the pricing "slope" of CPUs.
This sort of thing is simply sensible business, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't widespread in many other non-safety-critical areas too.
I mean, Sempron CPUs are essentially 64 bit processors with (assumably) one core switched off, correct? Same goes for ATI Radeon 9200SE based video cards (same chipset as a 9200 Pro, but with a set of pipelines disabled), if I recall correctly.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
believes the imperfections are often too small for humans to even notice
1+1=5 But I didn't see any problems on the chip!
"Intel inside, don't divide"
"here is a guide to making a CPU keychain."
There's a much faster way than bending the pins back and forth (and back...and forth...) until they snap. Use wire cutters to trim the pins off a row at a time--it doesn't need to be perfect--then rub the pin side of the chip briskly on concrete or a grindstone (don't turn the thing on if you enjoy fingertips) until smooth.
(If you have mod points and you think this is offtopic, bitch at the editor who left that link in the writeup.)
Celerons where mostly different chips.
Why?
Firstly L2 cache is redundancy protected. It means that instead of 256KB of cache there is 260KB or something similar amount of cache there are defective lines are replaced with a one that works. Another point is that L2 cache wasn't half the die area at the time not even close. So the defects because of the L2 is quite minimal, as many can be masked away. Another point is that MFG with less cache makes die area smaller so it would be cheaper for MASS producing it. Initially having same die size is effect of using SINGLE mask on both, and ADAPTING INVENTORY DEPENDING ON DEMAND. And avoid of spending ~Million dollars for having some savings in spend die area.
[Having multiple sets of masks, and multiple chip designs isn't cheap.]
Now with redundancy protection and having half the die area as cache on highend its even less of a good idea to reduce highend to low end, product by disabling cache. [Except on itanium volumes].
Consider a 120mm chip with a 60mm cache. If we have low end product with 1/4 of cache thats die area of 75mm Now if cache redundancy will handle 80%+ of defects that hit in cache area (estimated low) and there is overall yield of 80% it means that 4% of chips have defect in cache. And probably under 3% of more chips could be used again. And for low end product you could produce 1.6 as many chips for given die area just by making the cache proportionally smaller. Now if we consider the cache taking 25% of die area for highend(old chip) it means that after redundancy FIX the number of chips that could be rescued because of cache defect is 1% or less.
So having single die for two products and disabling parts of cache has NOTHING to do with reusing defective chips from purely economic reasons. Since making and running the system for reusing the things costs more than it saves.
Think 400mm(mostly cache that is redundancy protected to 90%) chip 80% overall yield 3000$ for a 300mm wafer.
The costs is 3000$*400/(PI*150*0.95*0.8) [some slack in edges=0.95 term] The result is ~22$ and real number is lower since Intel has MUCH cheaper wafers since that is what some foundries charge for their customers and intel is low costs leader in manufacturing besides that number has the gross margins for foundry partner included in it.]
The chip I talked about was ITANIUM2 with rounded numbers. P4 in reality costs probably >5$ for the silicon in reality currently. Now saving 1% on some large costs HUH. I think the work of making the recycling system outweights any gains for intel that could get from recycling bad cache parts as low end product. No they have ALL good parts in their high end product line, and they blow the fuse only because the want to make some low end products out of it.
BTW testing isn't cheap compared to silicon, in manycases its more expensive part of the process, and should be kept as simple as possible.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
... there were 32Kx1 DRAMs (4132/4532) used in, among others) the ZX Spectrum that were basically a 64Kx1 part with one faulty "half". There were several wire links on the board as part of the upper 32k addressing, that allowed you to select "high" or "low" 32k. Obviously all the chips had to be the same...
Alas, you don't know what you're talking about. DRAM chips from the top manufacturers like Samsung and Micron are fully tested, so that at the end of the manufacturing process, the wafer is mapped with the locations of bad die and the die themselves are mapped with the location of bad cells. In fact, in a mature manufacturing process, most defects are correctable because of designed in redundant rows of cells, but those parts with too many defective cells are characterized quite well. It's no problem to ship the die off to someplace like SpecTek, which then determines if the chip can be recycled by disabling the affected bank on the chip and marketing it as a smaller chip, or if the chip can be sold into a market segment that doesn't care if there are a few bad bits - Teddy Ruxpin dolls are full of memory just like that.
Remember, the only way to know that the chip is perfect is to fully characterize that chip. The process of making that determination also determines exactly how a defective chip fails - and that information tells the recycler how to market the chip. It's been going on for over 15 years now...
Your post is REDUNDANT and posted after the following was posted :
1 19 87948
:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143059&cid=
(It was posted at March 19, @08:18PM, a half hour earlier and covers the same topic you stated)
it said
you do not know how disabling works
you are correct that motorola disabled FPU on 68xxx chips and sold them without fpu and sold non disabled chips at premium
you are correct that intel disables debugging hooks on intel chips and sells non disabled chips at premium
you are coorect that memory chips have disabled fields
you are corrrect to imply that non MP chips are sometimes crippled versions of MP chips. MP chips like titanic (titanium) are, by legal edict made to trade partners, illegal to disable MP features electronically, but other MP capable chips have been crippled and sold into uni-cpu channels.
but you do not know SHIT about how disabling works.. electronically gates are blown and cannot be repaired
no technology exists to repair these blown microfuse-like circuits
you are correct that dual chips will be tested and failures dropped, but the cores will be designed to fanout to only a single cpu package. they will not mount it in a dual package
for your prediction to be true (and it is not), the number of cpus would have to approach 8 or 16 cpus destined for a single package with only one or two disabled
the market would not stand for it, so the chips would actually be designed as 10 cpus of which 8 are left intact or 18 cpus of which 16 are not electronically disabled. but in that scenario the wiring would only go to 8 or 16 remaining cpus with no way to enable dead ones and no way to access the lines.
you should read the responses in the thread you are replying to before positing
not at current wafer size used in the last 5 years!!!!! its bogus claim. the nsa is guy is fibbing.
Your post is REDUNDANT and posted after the following was posted :
1 19 87948
:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=143059&cid=
(It was posted at March 19, @08:18PM, about two hours earlier and covers the same topic you stated)
it said
you do not know how disabling works
you are correct that motorola disabled FPU on 68xxx chips and sold them without fpu and sold non disabled chips at premium
you are correct that intel disables debugging hooks on intel chips and sells non disabled chips at premium
you are coorect that memory chips have disabled fields
you are corrrect to imply that non MP chips are sometimes crippled versions of MP chips. MP chips like titanic (titanium) are, by legal edict made to trade partners, illegal to disable MP features electronically, but other MP capable chips have been crippled and sold into uni-cpu channels.
but you do not know SHIT about how disabling works.. electronically gates are blown and cannot be repaired
no technology exists to repair these blown microfuse-like circuits
you are correct that dual chips will be tested and failures dropped, but the cores will be designed to fanout to only a single cpu package. they will not mount it in a dual package
for your prediction to be true (and it is not), the number of cpus would have to approach 8 or 16 cpus destined for a single package with only one or two disabled
the market would not stand for it, so the chips would actually be designed as 10 cpus of which 8 are left intact or 18 cpus of which 16 are not electronically disabled. but in that scenario the wiring would only go to 8 or 16 remaining cpus with no way to enable dead ones and no way to access the lines.
you should read the responses in the thread you are replying to before posting
What is this guy a professor of? As others have noted, this isnt very likely to work in practice. It's not even good enough for an answering machine if it compresses the audio. Any good compression method is likely to be tripped up by even one bad bit. After all the goal of compression is to make every bit count! In the case of CPU's, it doesnt seem likely that a random stuck bit is going to be innocuous. The quoted example of a LSB stuck on an adder is very contrived-- The arithmetic adder is probably less than 1% of a CPU's real estate. And again, even a LSB error is going to be unacceptable if any compressed or encrypted data goes through the adder, which is extremely likely these days. And let's not forget programs like compilers and linkers, which use the adder to calculate things like addresses. Off by a bit isnt going to cut it for avery large range of applications. And this guy got $1M to research this hare-brain idea? Sheesh.
Agree, probably should have been more specific though - I heard this claim while working at the ADSCS in Geraldton Australia - 1998.
"Look, matey, I know a dead chip when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now."
Obviously, the prof has little appreciation and a limited understanding of the free-market. If a chip mfg thought they could profit from his idea, they'd do it. We know that many mfg's have BEEN doing this for decades. They don't need big-brother NSF gov't agents to tell them how to make a profit. Another example of tax money forced out of the hands of those who earned it, and into the hands of those who beg for it, and little benfit arises from the foray, except for those involved in the money trail.
is that this one defect will unintentionally give the microprocessor the ability to realize itself and learn. Ultimately dooming mankind to a firey death at the hands of our microprocessing overlords.
Before he ruins the $50 CPU market. If I paid $70 for a graphics card and it miscolored pixels; I'd ship it back...then post a long rant about how pathetic the company is in several forums and my blogs...and then I'd probably be a loyal customer of their competition.
Seriously, this is terrible. Throw the defectives away; don't sell them to people as "good enough." It's bad enough that the car companies have been doing this for years; I don't want it in the silicon industry too!
The PXA250 in my Sharp Zaurus has a cache bug. The cache is disabled as sold. Sharp got to sell a device labeled as 400 MHz and surely paid a discount.
Many people have enabled the cache and report a much faster PDA that crashes once in a while. Not worth it to me.
Wasteful? Yes. Mindful of human nature? Very yes.
Programmable devices, as they have highly repeatable structures, get around this by having polyfuses on chip. If a device tests with bad cells the polyfuses are blown so that column is unused. You have to build a bit of redundandancy into the architecture but the improvements in yield more than make up for this. I know vendor A does this, not sure about vendor X though...
You've got it half wrong. This isn't socialist largesse, this is corporatist largesse: pure corporate welfare, where "academic scientists" are assigned to do the medium-term R&D of for-profit companies at taxpayers' expense. Or maybe we should wait until we know whether the project is successful, before we denounce this as socialist academic wankery or conservative corporate welfare.
Specifically, if the project fails, then it will be obvious in hindsight that the professor was pursuing an idiotic dream with no sense of practicality. If the project succeeds, then it will be obvious that the professor was doing shortsighted development work on obvious technology improvement for corporations, instead of the visionary work that we should require from academics.
I'm waiting with bated breath to know which kind of abuse we should heap on the professor. These are surely exciting times.
There is a simple solution.
Just market the chips as "Academic Editions" and sell them to universities at a discount. Then we'll see what Professor Pointyhead says when defective chips end up on his desktop, in his nic, in his cell phone, or in the LCD projector that he uses to teach a class.
Maybe he won't notice.
Perhaps, but mine was posted in a readable fashion. You know, capitalization, grammar, that sort of thing. Makes a difference, you know.
Is that you, Trent Lott?
You obviously have little appreciation and a limited understanding of the real world; you appear to be living in some right-wing libertarian fantasy. Put down the Ayn Rand book you are reading, and think for a while.
Manufacturers appreciate greatly that this research gets done at universities with public support.
1) Their stockholders have little patience for the multi-decade investment horizons which basic research requires to develop commerically viable technology. They also don't like the risk involved in basic research, where any single idea in isolation has a very low probability of leading to commercial viability. Commercially viable technologies come about when many ideas are "in the air" waiting for the right confluence of insight and investment to make the transition.
2) Research done at these universities creates trained university graduates who know something about chip manufacturing, meaning that chip manufacturers can hire these trained and selected people instead of hiring people off the street, training them in basic engineering for many years, and hoping that they turn out to be qualified.
3) In addition, the knowledge created in this kind of research is often the foundation for new enterprise creation. Perhaps you've heard of such companies as Google, started by people who got their ideas working in such a "socialistic academic dreamworld"?
Perhaps you are against all public education. After all, if it were in corporations' interests to have workers who could read, they would pay to teach the workers their ABCs. Given that huge amount of tax dollars are at work subsidizing public education, this is obviously a socialist fantasy. Better to close all the schools and let the free market work its magic, don't you think? It works so well in paradises like Afghanistan and Liberia, where the public sector hardly exists at all!
But you don't have to move there to enjoy the benefits. Soon, under the wise guidance of our brave President, the U.S. will also be a wonderful place where the NSF budget gets reduced while unworkable and never-going-to-be-used boondoggles like ballistic missile defense get the healthy funding levels they need to preserve liberty and freedom against the homosexual agenda!
For the terminally stupid, including you, the two previous paragraphs were sarcastic.
For all the flack that Fry's gets and deserves, it really is a better Radio Shack than Radio Shack. Fry's may be a lousy place to get a DVD recorder but, if it's 5:05 on a Sunday evening and you need a wire wrap socket, where else you gonna go?
You won't find Fry's in every major city but there are many in California and a few in other states as well.
I still don't understand how Radio Shack stays in business in competition with stores like Fry's.
Let me send a shout out to these guys - no hassles at all in the years I've got bits and pieces from them, and the odd time I didn't get a part that worked they sent me a new one no questions asked.
There's no need to get crap from radio shack anymore with the advent of Digikey and Mouser.
..don't panic
MOD PARENT UP +1 FUNNY!
I laughed out loud. Thanks!