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AMD Debuts Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X For Prebuilt PCs (techreport.com)
AMD announced two new second-generation Ryzen CPUs this morning. From a report: The Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X bring Precision Boost 2 and XFR 2 to quad-core Ryzens without integrated graphics, but there's a catch: these chips appear to be available exclusively to system integrators and OEMs for use in prebuilt systems. AMD is debuting the Ryzen 5 2500X in cooperation with Acer in the form of the Nitro 50 desktop PC. AMD says the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.
CPUs now have more cache memory than my first PC (8088) had of storage space.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So AMD found a defect and had to bin the part. But instead of throwing to the trash they decided to disable to broken silicon and sell the part for cheap - for computers that will also probably be cheap. Both Intel and AMD have done the exact same thing for years. This is news because? New part numbers one needs to remember to avoid?
Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.
I can't believe I used to care about this kind of shit.
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Shhhhhh. Marketing people and investors might hear you! Do you really wanna screw up months of stealth fixes (if they actually exist at all)?
Gosh darn it, it's people like you that make coders, operating system kernel fixers, and other expensive personnel work overtime-- not to mention people that must fix firmware, patch millions upon millions of hosts, and all for what? So you can have a secure system? What the hell is wrong with you?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Your preferences are not universal.
That's more of an RCA (circa 1980) and they were probably copying some earlier manufacturer.
There are lots of good reasons to split the market that way, and if you don't, prices on the low end will rise considerable, and prices on the high end will drop quite a bit less...I'm presuming you intend the same percentage of profit (though even that's iffy, as the profit at the high end is probably higher as a percentage than the profit at the low end, where you can dump the seconds).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The entire product line is one chip design. They burn out fuses in the chips to disable features to make the lower end ones.
When you make chips, you produce a big wafer that gets cut into individual chips. There will be defects in the wafer. You can generally predict roughly how many defects there will be, but not where they will be. So you design your chips so that portions of them can be disabled.
You get a perfect chip with no flaws? That gets sold as the top of the line part. You get a chip with defective cores? That one has cores disabled and gets sold as a lower end chip. Maybe the cores are fine, but there's flaws in the L2 cache? Disable part of the cache and put it in a lower end bin. Or maybe everything works, but the chip starts to get unreliable if you clock it too fast. Again, into a lower end bin.
Chips get designed this way because it means you can still sell most of the chips that have flaws in them. You'll still get some unusable chips, but most flaws can be worked around to produce a product you can sell.
If the market wants a lot of low end chips, sometimes you end up disabling working features to meet demand. It's way, way cheaper to do that than it is to set up a separate manufacturing line just for the lower end chips. This is more likely to happen later in the lifecycle of a particular chip, after manufacturing has been running for a while and the flaws have been worked out. It's usually not worth setting up another manufacturing line to make lower end chips when this happens.
The entire product line is one chip design. They burn out fuses in the chips to disable features to make the lower end ones.
They do that now, but you're kinda beginning with the ending of the story. It used to be that the disabled functionality could often be easily restored because it was either programmable (firmware image) or reversible (reconnect severed connectors). A few hackers did it and sometimes got a free upgrade but it didn't bother anybody. However some shady dealers starting doing this on a large scale, selling cheap products as more expensive ones to unsuspecting customers causing lost profit and angry customers with unstable or broken systems. So they started to use fuses, once the functionality is disabled it's permanently and irreversibly gone. I guess the GP wanted the "good old days" of free upgrades back, but I don't think they will...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
AMD is scraping a little more profit from the binning process at the lower end.
They might as well since intel is playing their silly games with the vendors again to stick it to AMD. Just try to find a properly configured Ryzen laptop nowdays. All the vendors have put R5 and R7s into kit which is not designed to let them run to their best performance, just cheap packaging with crap like soldered-in memory that can't be expanded and thermals the wind up with R5s benchmarking faster than R7s. Doubtless after input from intel telling them to only make crappy AMD systems until intel has a chance to catch up around Gen 9 or 10.
And now intel is spending more $$$ with TMSC for 14nm stuff. You just know it's a way of passing them money to usurp some of the AMD capacity or de-prioritize it.
No sense in AMD sending out higher-end chips to go into these bottom-end boxes. Save the good stuff for vendors who will let the chips live up to their potential better and make a few bucks off the lesser yielding wafers.
Dear AMD. Please don't do an Intel.
No. Dear AMD please do exactly what Intel and everyone else does across many industries. Please ensure that the expensive products continue to subsidise the cheap and than you keep your production costs as low as possible as a result.