this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
264 points (96.2% liked)

Technology

59217 readers
2864 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Depends on the nature of the failure. This is super common in CPUs for example. The absolutely perfect ones go in the top quality bin, those are your i9 and Ryzen 9 CPUs. Ones that are functionally fine, but a bit unstable at the higher clock speeds end up in the next lower quality bin, so something like an i7 or a Ryzen 7. Then you have ones that maybe have a failed core or two, those ones have the failed cores fused off and go in the next lower bin with lower core counts. Etc.

In the case of a flash memory chip as long as it isn't corrupting data at a certain speed I'd expect it to be binned down to a lower quality bin. Assuming whoever buys that chip runs it at the clock speed the binning says to run it at it should be fine. Where you'd run into problems is if whoever buys it ignores what they were told and runs it at the full speed, in which case you're going to end up with corrupted data.

Likewise other things that could lead to a usable but lower quality chip is if certain areas of memory were bad. As long as you disable those failed memory regions and sell it as a lower capacity chip that's also fine. Once again though if the buyer re-enables the failed memory regions then that's a problem.