What is physically different between a high-end CPU (e.g. Intel i7) and a low-end one (Intel i3)? What makes the low-end one cheaper?
In: Technology
Most reply seem to focus on a process often called binning: disabling and rerouting defective or underperforming parts of a chip to “act” as a lower-spec config.
However, this only works for specific lines of processors – in GPUs you often see this happening between the top-tier and sub-top tier of a line.
For the rest of the range, chips are actually designed to be physically different: most chips are modular, cores and caches can be resized and modified independently during the design process. Especially stuff like cache takes up a lot of space on the die, but is easily scalable to fit lower specs. Putting in and taking out caches, cores and other more “peripheral circuits” can lower the size (and fail rate) of chips without needing to design completely different chips.
edit: use proper term, no idea where I got “harvesting”, binning is def. the proper term.
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