Hacker News Reader

Comment by theginger | Hacker News Reader

> The only drawback to this is that the potential for customers to be ripped of by untrustworthy dealers selling overclocked CPUs to the public at the price of the actual CPU speed is increased by a large margin. Intel long ago locked the multiplier of their CPUs to keep such things from happening with their processors

Is the author being charitable or do people really believe this was to protect consumers rather than constrain them?

View on HN

The constraint was real, sure. But also, making lower binned/spec'd chips act like faster ones and then selling them for the same price, that was also something that happened.

If someone paid $500, they should get the $500 chip, not a $220 made to work like the $500 one. So both things can be true.

Lying about the chip (ie saying that it's a $500 intel chip when it's actually an overclocked $200 chip), is clearly unethical. That said the realities of chip binning make this weird, as you could also argue that it's unethical and wasteful to artificially lock down some hardware's potential. It's not only chips that suffer from this, like when BMW tried to apply a monthly subscriptions for using the heated seats that came with your car.

BMW does a lot of this kind of shenanigans, not just with their heated seats. They also charge extra to unlock the horsepower of their engines. There are several performance levels which have the exact same engine with only a few different parameters tweaked in the firmware in order to limit the horsepower output to the level each customer paid for. Tractor manufacturers do the exact same thing with horsepower output. And it's not just John Deer (famously anti-customer and anti-right-to-repair) but most (or maybe all) of the major brands are doing similar shit.

One could argue the warranty claims are likely lower on the detuned engines

A great way to extend battery life is lie about the capacity in the UI and only charge to 80%.

Or you can think of it in the opposite manner, they could just sell all of the $500 spec'd chips as $500 chips and miss out on an entire market of people that could use a lower spec'd chip at $200.

But that's besides the point. If I'm buying a $500 chip, I want that chip. The one that passed, qualified and is guaranteed at that speed by the manufacturer. I don't want a $200 chip that you hacked to happen to be able to run at that speed.

If you want to buy that $200 chip and hack it to run at $500 speeds go for it, there's nothing wrong with that.

saying that chip binning is unethical assumes the binning is truly for purely artificial reasons.

What if the binning is genuinely because hardware is failing the required QC? Wouldn’t it be ethical to sell a unit that isn’t at risk of breaking/corrupting data etc and reusing the same units that have already been made?

Binning is a pragmatic approach to reducing waste while providing products at different price points.

I don't remember the time frame but it was a Slot A cpu that I bought from some russian owned company in Irvine in the early 2000's that was doing exactly this practice. Since I was planning on overclocking it myself, and had taken steps to record as much about the transaction myself (because I knew this scam was going on), when reported to AMD, they had their lawyers contact me to provide an affidavit because they we're attempting to sue the shit out as many of these sellers as possible. They also replaced the cpu with the one I intended to purchase so at least the story ended nicely but what a pain in the ass it was.

I bought a counterfeit Athlon XP (one modded to look like a 3200+) and spent some time troubleshooting its problems before dealing with getting my money back (from my credit card company - the vendor has already disappeared). There are definitely some advantages for the consumer in making counterfeiting difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com