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Intel taking 6-core route for broken 8-core CPUs

@ 2009/02/13

One major part of the Xeon presentation is Intel's "cache and core recovery" scheme, which lets the company salvage a usable part from a defective chip by disabling the defective regions and selling the chip with a lower core count or cache amount.

So for instance, if testing and validation finds a defect in a cache slice on a chip, then Intel can disable that slice and sell the chip with lower cache. And likewise with cores, so that you might buy a six-core chip from Intel that was originally produced as an 8-core Xeon but had two defective cores.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/02/13

stupid move in respect to product yields; intelligent move in respect to performance and power usage

Comment from Rutar @ 2009/02/13

It seems to be a consequence when you put all cores on one die the yields suffer and you have to resort to this method.

Maybe all cores on one die is a stupid move.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/02/13

September 2007:

Quote:

Asked in a press conference following his Intel Developer Forum keynote how Intel might respond to AMD's recent announcement of a planned three-core processor for early 2008, Otellini offered a brief but savage response: "We see a distinct advantage in having all the cores on our die work."

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/14512/1154/

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