[gwbas1c]

It's most likely both a hardware issue and a microcode issue.

Making CPUs is kind-of like sorting eggs. When they're made, they all have slightly different characteristics and get placed into bins (IE, "binned") based on how they meet the specs.

To oversimplify, the cough "better" chips are sold at higher prices because they can run at higher clock speeds and/or handle higher voltages. If there's a spec of dust on the die, a feature gets turned off and the chip is sold for a lower price.

In this case, this is most likely an edge case that would not be a defect if shipping microcode already handled it. (Although it is appropriate to ask if it would result in effected chips going into a lower-price bin if they are effected.)

[nequo]

> If there's a spec of dust on the die, a feature gets turned off and the chip is sold for a lower price.

Do you mean that if a 13900KS CPU has a manufacturing defect, it gets downgraded and sold as 13900F or something else according to the nature of the defect?

[phire]

It's way more extreme than that.

For any named product (such as Raptor Lake) intel only make 1-3 unique silicon dies. Any product in the Alder Lake only had two dies, 8P+8E and 6P+0E [1]. Every single SKU comes from those two dies, if it has E cores, it's the 8P+8E die. Which means Alder Lake-N is actually the 8P+8E dies with all the P cores disabled.

The laptop versions, Alder Lake-P (20w) and Alder Lake-U (9 and 15w) are also the 8P+8E die, they couldn't use the 6P+0E die, because it has no E cores at all.

Raptor Lake is only one die with 8 P cores and 16 E cores, which they sell as every i9 and i7, along with the two top i5 designs. In the 13th generation, the remaining i5s are the Alder Lake 8P+8E die and the i3s are all Alder Lake 6P+0E dies.

The manufacturing defects aren't binary, it's not a simple pass/fail. It's all very analog: Some dies are simply able to reach higher clock speeds, or use more or less power. They test every single die and bin it based on its capabilities. The ones with the best power consumption go to the P and U SKUs. The ones which can reach the highest clock speeds are labeled as 13900KS, dies which just miss that get sold as 13900K, the rest get spread over all remaining SKUs based on their capabilities.

Intel couldn't decide to exclusively make 13900KS dies if they wanted to, because they are simply the top 0.1% of dies. They are forced to make 1000 dies, use the best one and sell the rest as lower SKUs.

[1] Wikichip has photos of the two dies: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/alder_...

[gwbas1c]

It's been almost 20 years since I worked in the industry, so I don't want to make assumptions about specific products.

When I was in the industry, it would be things like disabling caches, disabling cores, ect. I don't remember specific products, though.

Likewise, some die can handle higher voltages, clock speeds, ect.

[colejohnson66]

Yes. It’s called the silicon lottery.

[account42]

Silicon lottery was when you as a customer could get dies of varying degrees, some of which could be clocked higher than others. For the manufacturer it's not a lottery at all because the scales make the yields for various bins mostly predictable. Binning also means that you as a customer are much less likely to get a chip that is significantly better than specced although it still happens when chips sold as a lower bin for market segmentation purposes.