[dastbe]

chip manufacturing is an imperfect process, and so there is variance in performance/viability of all of the hardware on a chip. the higher performing chips are "binned" for the top end of the price point, while the lower performing chips are either binned for lower performance or have some of their functionality disabled. For contrived example, A company may produce nothing but quad core chips but sell those with some cores that don't meet minimum performance as dual cores with the bad cores physically disabled.