As this comment claims[0], it does seem like eventually it gets to where what you're saying is true, in that it's basically artificial segmentation.

So I guess the next step is to stop selling the lower-binned card? https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-repor...

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50452839

Prepare to be repugnantated regularly.

You’re going to be very disappointed to discover that this is common practice for many technology products. It’s cheaper and less risky to design a small number of things and then segment their capabilities than it is to make custom things for every different market segment.

It’s also useful for binning: These lower spec locked products can have defects in the unused parts, like flakey memory regions or channels. Not every CMP170 can be fully usable after unlocks.

The alternative to this market segmentation isn’t “Everyone gets the whole thing for the lowest price”. It’s that the lower price version doesn’t exist at all, or if it does it’s a lot more expensive.

With a bit of nuance of understanding it's not that wild or egregious, and no one is really getting cheated.

Basically the high price of the fully unlocked models is what makes it possible to sell artificially limited models at the lower price point (while also offering the ability to possibly sell lower binned units). Basically you can gas the profit on the high-end to drive down the cost on the low end, but obviously this only works if you have a distinct High and Low end.

People think that if we banned this practice it would lead to the top shelf models being sold at the bottom shelf price. But that's just naive market confusion. A ban would just mean that the top shelf unit at a higher price and the lower shelf unit at a higher price would be available.

There is no solve to the "problem" that results in "High shelf unit being sold at lower cost", in fact the thing you are complaining about is already the closest to that ideal, as the manufacturer can leverage economies of scale to drive down costs across the product line.

I understand your position, but as someone who prefers the lower end products (and the lower end prices!), this policy would be detrimental for me.

At the beginning of a product, when yields are bad, I could get a low tier chip at a good price, but then as yields get better, low tier chips wouldn't be available and I no longer have a low cost option. Presumably higher yields would lead to reduced prices on the higher tier chips, but I don't think they'd get down to where the low tier chips were.

Another alternative is that the maker only ever sells chips that test successfully as high tier, but I think it's repugnant to not make use of parts with defects if the defects can be gated off.

When yields get better, manufacturer can just produce the lower tier chip directly.

They still wouldn't because economies of scale make it cheapest to only build one model.

Its not economies of scale. Why or how would you even etch a worse pattern on the same fabrication node? They don’t even have a mask for the worse version its literally just the same pattern with more defects.

They only make one design because of economies of scale. I think there might have been some confusion here

Maybe you can get more of them per wafer because they're smaller?

Yes but that’s a different thing those smaller chips also get binned based on defects

What economies of scale are you referring to?

Each wafer is printed separately. They don't build new custom production line for each new design.

This wouldn't really work for AMD processors... They could design and fab a 6-core chiplet, but it would need to be the same size as the 8-core chiplets so it would interface to the same carriers. If the footprint is the same, the fab cost is roughly the same, so spending the design time on that doesn't make sense. If they build separate carriers, that's more design time and inventory management and it may well be more expensive than just building 8-cores and disabling two.

That said, with Zen6 having 12 cores per chiplet, I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually end up designing a smaller chiplet with 6 cores and a dedicated small chiplet carrier. Or push 6 core SKUs to the APU side that doesn't use chiplets and I think has small core count variants.

No, they can't. The lower tier chips exist pretty much entirely because they can be easily converted from the higher tier chips that are defective. Purpose-building a lower tier chip would be a ludicrously expensive thing to do, or else they'd already be doing that.

A fun example of this is Apple, who used to build three dies for each M-series generation (base, Pro, Max) but now build just two (base, Pro/Max). You'd think one of the most bespoke companies on the planet would not be moving to fewer dies unless there were very compelling reasons to do so.

I think the idea is that as technology improves, you can get better technology for the same price. That's what the system of capitalism promised to us.

That does tend to happen... an 8 core Zen 5 (9700X) costs about the same today as the 6 core Zen 5 (9600X) did two years ago. But even if AMD doesn't have any defective 9700X to disable cores and sell as 9600X, they still want to attract the value buyer and so they'll take some perfectly fine chips, disable two cores and sell them as 9600X for less than the 9700X. They lose some margin, but they make it up in volume as we were promised.

This is one of the reasons a market is superior to centralized taste-setters. Despite the fact that both a seller and buyer can agree on a price for a less capable product, taste-makers often have these strange neuroses about what they should be paying for.

All sorts of reasonable interactions are then policed by people with visceral reactions to normal activity.

Imagine a world without this, where nothing was hamstrung and there was only one price point instead of a hamstrung low price and a nonhamstrung high price.

That one price would be somewhere between the low price and the high price. So, the world you want to live in would be one where "the poor" who currently pay the low price would need to pay more. And "the rich" would get a discount from their high price they pay currently. That seems morally repugnant beyond words.

Best not to imagine because they're both sold way past the manufacturing cost and I'm not under the impression that nvidia puts all the money back into development.

At least not the development of GPUs.

The margins are irrelevant here. If Nvidia sold them for the exact cost of manufacturing, people would just scoop them up and re-sell them to the highest bidder. So in the case of 0% margin, some useless middle-man would get to profit.

It's really no different. They are selling you a product with X advertised specs, and indeed the specs you can access as the customer (at least out of the box) are those exact advertised specs.

There ought to be a law which stipulates that these segments are "soft," for the purpose of selling a working but partially defective product (and segmented due to that defect), and permit customers to undo the segmentation at their own risk. DMCA should not protect this practice IMO.