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
Usually i3/i5 are chips that aren’t good enough or has damages so it can’t be sold as i7. Design wise they are usually the same. Every die is tested and depending on its property it could become an desktop or a mobile chip with 4 to 8 cores with or without igpu. Usually the parts that aren’t used will be disconnected from the rest of the die, got some rare cases when they didn’t do it and you could upgrade cpu/gpu via firmware if you got lucky
On a silicon wafer usually center yield the best quality, and especially in the corner the quality is usually lower resulting in more cpus where not all cores are working
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