My understanding in both cases was that it was just something to do with
the chips whose integer units passed quality control but whose FPU's
didn't. If the demand for the FPU-less chip got to be higher than the
failure rate, there were undoubtedly some fully working chips shipping with
their FPU disabled, but that's nothing new. When the demand for chips with
low clock speeds exceeds the percentage of chips that run at a low speed
but fail at a high speed, they'll just label a high-speed chip with the low
speed and sell it at a discount. The tricky part of selling chips is to
adjust your price structure so that demand for each of your
performance/quality levels matches the percentage of your chips that
perform at that level.
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Andrew Meggs, content provider Antennahead Industries, Inc.
<mailto:insect@antennahead.com> <http://www.antennahead.com>