CPU manufacture

[Mr Muggles]

Just seen TTL's 560-448 reviews and was thinking. Do they make the 1 type of cpu and then gradually sell them off depending on their performance. So there is no difference between an 13, 15 , i7 in effect they are all the same chip, it's just the i3's are very bad I7's..Or have I got this completely wrong

Is the 1190T AMD chip the same as the lower-end chip?

 

[hmmblah]

Just seen TTL's 560-448 reviews and was thinking. Do they make the 1 type of cpu and then gradually sell them off depending on their performance. So there is no difference between an 13, 15 , i7 in effect they are all the same chip, it's just the i3's are very bad I7's..Or have I got this completely wrong

Is the 1190T AMD chip the same as the lower-end chip?

To an extent yes. Some will be lower clocked versions of the same line or like with AMD you could have Quads that become X3 and X2 CPUs. Loads of X2s would unlock to quads.

 

[Dolph123]

If i remember correctly, some of the cores a actually cut off. On an i3 the actual size of the CPU under the housing is only the half of an i7 (or any other quad core), because the two of the cores are not included. I remember seeing a picture of this, but i'm not a 100% sure it's true.

 

[Nculver]

Just seen TTL's 560-448 reviews and was thinking. Do they make the 1 type of cpu and then gradually sell them off depending on their performance. So there is no difference between an 13, 15 , i7 in effect they are all the same chip, it's just the i3's are very bad I7's..Or have I got this completely wrong

Is the 1190T AMD chip the same as the lower-end chip?

To a certain degree some of the "different" chips are exactly the same, just in varying qualities. This is not to say that an i3 2300 is the same chip (just lower quality) as an i7 2600k. Realy you should expect chips to be the same when they have the same name with a slightly lower clock. For instance the 1090t and the 1100t are the exact same design, just with a 100mhz clock difference. However a 1090t is not a super high quality Althlon II x3, because there are only 4 physical cores on the Athlon while the 1090t has 6. So it was not that the foundry was trying to produce a 1090t and ended up with an athlon x3, but the foundry was trying to make roughly the same hexa core when it ended up with the 1055,1090, and 1100t.

That being said you will also hear about different processes that are used to make the chips, and different architectures, which usually all of the chips in the same socket or generation will share. All of the second gen i5 and i7s are "sandybridge" in their architecture, despite being priced differently and serving different functions from other "sandybridge" chips. for instance both the i3 2300 and the i7 2600k are sandy bridge chips, but the i3 is a CPU oriented at the mid level gaming and entertainment pc and just general usage while the i7 is a highly threaded monster for video editing and anything else that can utilize more than 4 threads, and the i5 2500k is targeted at those who can utilize 4 threads or less.

Now obviously this is an over simplification of things, but the general idea is roughly true. Processors that are of the same architecture and core count (unless you know that it has deactivated cores) that vary from each other by only a few hundred mhz are most likely very similar chips, just one had a few more nanometer sized imperfections preventing it from being suitably marketed with a higher clock. This also explains why two 2500k chips will not overclock to the same levels, or will need varying voltages for stability. No two chips are identical.