| There is a huge difference. The number of defects is an average over an area. So if you double your die area then you get double as many defective chips. Making a bigger chip means you throw away more dies. So Intel's 34 Core would be even more expensive to produce. Imagine it like taking a low res photo of a paper with dots drawn on it. The bigger the pixel the bigger the black spots on the paper will be. The higher resolution your camera is, ie the smaller the pixel, the more pixels that aren't black, ie defective silicon. AMD has the advantage here, their 4 core dies are very small so they can produce them with a high yield rate. The defect one with 1 or 2 defect cores but otherwise okay are recycled. Then everything is binned according to their performance (chips can have wildly different performance). Another advantage Intel does not have. If one core on the 28 core chip does not manage to run stable on 2.8 GHz (example if they sold the chip at that) that means either bin it on the next lower frequency to run at or trash the die. For AMD a low running chip means getting it into a lower bin. If they build a 32 core CPU with high core they just need to select from 4 core dies that run fast. The difference here is very surprising, IIRC AMD stated their yield rate is 98%. For comparison, a chip like the 28 core Intel Xeon would be expected to have around 60% if not worse. And Intel can't rebin a bad Xeon for a low power desktop CPU in the lowest market segment since the die is too big for those sockets. |