I remember way back some of the guys I worked
with at DEC Research had an Evil Plan(tm) to try
to buy a bunch of RAM that had been culled at a
fab plant. Apparently there were plenty of chips
that "almost" worked but weren't fast enough (e.g.
100ns RAM that didn't work at 100ns but worked
fine at 300ns...) or didn't store all the bits -
the idea was to run them slower and keep parity
for lossage. Interesting idea, anyhow, though
I bet it'd be hard to get a microprocessor
maker to sell their "seconds" - since they're
"garbage" at that point, though, you could get
'em cheap, in theory.;)
mjr.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember way back some of the guys I worked with at DEC Research had an Evil Plan(tm) to try to buy a bunch of RAM that had been culled at a fab plant. Apparently there were plenty of chips that "almost" worked but weren't fast enough (e.g. 100ns RAM that didn't work at 100ns but worked fine at 300ns...) or didn't store all the bits - the idea was to run them slower and keep parity for lossage. Interesting idea, anyhow, though I bet it'd be hard to get a microprocessor maker to sell their "seconds" - since they're "garbage" at that point, though, you could get 'em cheap, in theory. ;)
mjr.