[hobofan]

> They help the industry and help finance the lower-end models

Do they though? From how most companies operate that I've seen from the inside, I would assume that such a market response would shift their focus towards high-end models, and low-end models will be neglected.

Sure, there is somewhat of a technology trickle down towards lower-end models over time, but that seems to be driven on an industry/supplier/competition level and mostly disconnected from luxury consumers. Especially "_financing_ the lower-end models" seems unlikely, as no manufacturer would lower the prices on the lower-end models, just because they make "enough" on the high-end ones. The only way this would apply would be through shared overhead, which given that we are talking about different product lines often tends to be minimal.

[kaibee]

> The only way this would apply would be through shared overhead, which given that we are talking about different product lines often tends to be minimal.

My understanding is that in the CPU case, the lower product tiers are literally just higher tier chips that had faults in some cores/areas and had those features disabled.

[leetcrew]

> The only way this would apply would be through shared overhead, which given that we are talking about different product lines often tends to be minimal.

this is very much not minimal in the CPU business though. intel's entire line of (consumer) desktop parts is different bins of the same chip. they wouldn't be able to offer an i3 for $120 if they weren't also selling i9s for $500. and they probably couldn't sell consumer parts for <$1000 at all if they couldn't sell xeon parts with the same architecture for thousands of dollars.

[ac29]

> intel's entire line of (consumer) desktop parts is different bins of the same chip.

Is that true? Intel's 14nm yields are high enough that it wouldnt really make sense for the dirt cheap quad core processors to secretly be 8 core processors with half the cores (and cache) disabled.

[leetcrew]

I think for the current gen parts, the quad core parts are actually six core dies with two disabled. the overall point stands though.