> This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.Previous | First | 1 | Last | Next
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wozThis is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
The chip powering the Neo is Apple’s A18 Pro, the same chip first used inside the iPhone 16 Pro two years ago, but with one key difference. The Neo version of the chip has a “5-core” graphics processor, one less than the version inside the 2024 iPhones, indicating that Apple was able to save some of the A18 Pro chips with a defective core for future use.
Defective cores can be disabled, leaving a chip that still functions perfectly well to power different, often cheaper devices—in this case an entry-level laptop instead of a top-of-the-line iPhone.
What began as a salvage operation for mobile silicon has evolved into a cornerstone of Apple’s design strategy, allowing it to segment its lineup with surgical precision, achieving efficiencies that smaller rivals struggle to match, analysts said.
“If you can take the stuff that doesn’t meet highest level specs and still use it, you can save money, scrap and time,” says Tim Culpan, a supply-chain analyst who has written about Apple’s Neo chip orders.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/apple-is-makin … amp;page=1
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SamplesBoiRe: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
I have an entire wafer of (mostly) working 6502s that was sold as scrap a few years ago, it was manufactured around 1990 and put on a shelf for later dicing, packaging, and sale but was never sold.
You can see the flying probe marks under the microscope and the marks where the machine x'ed out the bad dies.
Am I rich? Can I sell this back to Apple for future integration into products? 
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
SamplesBoi wrote:
I have an entire wafer of (mostly) working 6502s that was sold as scrap a few years ago, it was manufactured around 1990 and put on a shelf for later dicing, packaging, and sale but was never sold.
You can see the flying probe marks under the microscope and the marks where the machine x'ed out the bad dies.
Am I rich? Can I sell this back to Apple for future integration into products?
How many inch wafer?
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
SamplesBoi wrote:
I have an entire wafer of (mostly) working 6502s that was sold as scrap a few years ago, it was manufactured around 1990 and put on a shelf for later dicing, packaging, and sale but was never sold.
You can see the flying probe marks under the microscope and the marks where the machine x'ed out the bad dies.
Am I rich? Can I sell this back to Apple for future integration into products?
get rid of that wafer - final warning
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.,Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
wrote:
get rid of that wafer - final warning
a final warning - that's like a death sentence around this place 
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
Apple have outpriced the general market.
Their stuff is ridiculously expensive now.
Nobody wants.
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
wrote:
Apple have outpriced the general market.
Their stuff is ridiculously expensive now.
Nobody wants.
For what it is, the Neo isn't ridiculously expensive.
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
wrote:
For what it is, the Neo isn't ridiculously expensive.
Because there’s a defective CPU in there
They won’t know the difference
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
wrote:
Apple have outpriced the general market.
Their stuff is ridiculously expensive now.
Nobody wants.
Record sales but nobody wants.
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Re: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
wrote:
Because there’s a defective CPU in there
They won’t know the difference
\
To run Pages/Numbers/iTunes/iMessage/Safari... they won't know the difference.
The binned-chip Neo is out of stock. V2 maybe a better upgrade from the parts bin.
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Assclown Mini TacosRe: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
wrote:
Because there’s a defective CPU in there
They won’t know the difference
\
This is not exactly new though - disabling part of chips for yield management has been going on for a long time. A lot of the old 8-bit computers used "32 kbit" DRAM chips that were really defective 64 kbit parts sorted based on which side of the die the bad bits were in. More recently, we had those AMD "triple core" CPUs that were quad-core with one bad core that was fused out during the production process. The Playstation 3 Cell CPU had 8 SPE cores - but the system was configured to only use 7 so that parts with a single bad SPE were still usable.
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SockpuppetRe: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
Assclown Mini Tacos wrote:
This is not exactly new though - disabling part of chips for yield management has been going on for a long time. A lot of the old 8-bit computers used "32 kbit" DRAM chips that were really defective 64 kbit parts sorted based on which side of the die the bad bits were in. More recently, we had those AMD "triple core" CPUs that were quad-core with one bad core that was fused out during the production process. The Playstation 3 Cell CPU had 8 SPE cores - but the system was configured to only use 7 so that parts with a single bad SPE were still usable.
I learned something new today. That’s cool.
The only thing I knew along these lines is that some chips from Intel could either become Xeon or Core depending on tolerances for stability. And the same thing for Core over clock chips and standard Core version of the same chip.
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Assclown Mini TacosRe: This is kind of MBA genius innovation going on at Apple these days.
Sockpuppet wrote:
I learned something new today. That’s cool.
The only thing I knew along these lines is that some chips from Intel could either become Xeon or Core depending on tolerances for stability. And the same thing for Core over clock chips and standard Core version of the same chip.
Yeah, that stuff falls more into binning - you make a bunch of CPUs and then test them and the ones with more margin get marked as being higher speed. Creating parts that used silicon that was actually defective is just the more extreme version of this.
The other thing with binned parts is that depending on the orders the vendor has they might mark them with a lower speed grade than they were actually capable of handling - later versions of the MMX Pentiums were famous for this because most of the chips were capable of running at the highest speed rating, but most of the demand was for slightly slower parts, so once they filled all the orders for the fastest parts they would take the remaining chips and mark them as being whatever speed the customers had actually ordered.
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