That would have been pretty standard fare for the chip making industry. Clock speed is already determined by which chips on the wafer can test how high. The Cell processor on the PS3 is fabricated with 8 SPUs, but they ship with only seven activated so the chip can still ship if one of the SPUs is bad.
It's just yield-increasing strategies, making chips cheaper for us.
Thanks!
AMD’s [”rather unique”] Triple-Core Processors —
Yield-Improvement Technique, Says Intel.
XBitLabs | 10/08/2007 | 11:53 PM | Anton Shilov
Posted on 10/17/2007 4:00:58 PM EDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1912630/posts
[snip] The new quad-core AMD Opteron and the forthcoming quad-core AMD Phenom processors use monolith implementation, which means that all the cores are incorporated into a single piece of silicon. By contrast, current quad-core processors from Intel use multi-chip-package technique and incorporate two dual-core processors onto a single piece of substrate. [end]
AMD delays Phenom 2.4 GHz due to TLB errata
theinquirer.net | Sunday, 18 November 2007, 5:29 PM | Theo Valich
Posted on 11/19/2007 12:38:44 AM EST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1927705/posts