[Paul_Clayton]

Die yield can depend on redundancy and sensitivity to process variation.

Column/row redundancy for SRAM arrays is common and multicore designs provide core redundancy. Theoretically even out-of-order scheduler entries and functional units could be disabled. SIMD width variability could provide another means of tolerating defects and/or variation while providing a sellable result.

If a usable/sellable die only needs to reach half of the best frequency or half the best case energy efficiency, yield can be higher than if nothing less than 95% of best is worthwhile. If better dies can be sold at higher profit, the economics change. Durability is also a variable that can be tuned (e.g., "The BubbleWrap many-core: Popping cores for sequential acceleration" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=13412927692517066... ).

Yield does not seem to be simply a matter of defects per square centimeter. At least so it appears to this computer architecture enthusiast.

[sevensor]

Depends on how big they are, what layer they land on, what they’re composed of. I was a semiconductor process engineer for a few years, and honestly the worst damage came from people, and not in the “people shed dust everywhere” sense, but in the “people do dumb things” sense. Like when the robot goes bonkers and you have to manually recover a wafer, so you just grab it with your fingers, slot it back in the carrier, and send the lot off to cleans after processing the rest through on a different machine. We would have whole lots with elevated defects because people did stuff like this.