This is done because your production yield is not 100%.
So instead of throwing away every produced component which doesn't achieve the target of your 100%-product, you "soft-lock" the components with 80~99% performance into a 80%-product category, and the ones with 60~80% into a 60%-product.
This way you increase the total yield-rate, and produce less waste.
The counter-intuitive waste happens when the demand for the 60%-product is exceeding your "natural" supply of 60%-output, so you have to start to "soft-lock" some of your "80%-product" production to the 60%-grade to fulfill demand...
This tends to be the case later on in a product's production run, as the manufacturer has fine tuned the process and worked out most of the kinks, the pass-rate of finished items increases.
At this point, yes they may lock down perfectly good high end CPUs to a midrange model spec to meet a production quota.
But do these production defects really meet the demand of the lower tiers? Also how is it possible to predict the number of defects in advance so that they can make useful promises to distributors?
Well eventually as yields improve you start handicapping perfectly valid chips to main market segmentation.
I cannot say this for certain in CPUs but I know in other electronics with PCBs that this is how it is done. Sometimes lower-end SKUs are made by opening a higher-end one and cutting a wire or a trace.
I'm curious about this as well. It seems inevitable that some batches will be "too good" to satisfy demand of low end chips.
Either they just accept the fluctuations in order to maximize output of high end chips, or they would have to cripple fully functional ones to maintain a predictable supply. Interesting business.
It's not primarily about using defective chips (but that's a nice side effect). As a process becomes mature, yield rates become very high and there wouldn't be enough defective chips to meet demand for a lower tier, so good chips are binned into those tiers anyway.
The primary purpose is market segmentation: extracting value from customers who would pay more while not giving up sales to more price sensitive clients who nevertheless pay more than the marginal cost of production.
That makes sense, thanks. I wonder if it would be possible to de-bin one of the lower end ones, assuming it is a binned version of a fully functional higher tier chip. Or perhaps they completely destroy the offlined cores/features.
