Maybe you don’t know, every time you buy a desktop CPU, you will also receive a lucky draw called the “silicon lottery”. Two CPUs of the same name can perform differently when pushed to their clock limits due to something called “CPU binning”.
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What is Binning?
Binning is a sorting process in which the best-performing chips are selected from lower-performing chips. This process can be used for CPU, GPU (graphics card) and RAM.
Suppose you want to produce and sell two different CPU models: one that is fast and expensive, and another that is slower but cheap. Should you design two different CPU models and manufacture them separately? Why do that when you can just use “binning?”
Manufacturing processes are never perfect, especially at the billionth of a meter level needed to produce CPUs. When you produce fast and expensive CPUs, you end up with some products that cannot run at top speeds. At this point, you can adjust them to run at a slower speed and sell them for less.
Specific example: You plan to produce Core i7-10700. But when running the test, there are a few cores that cannot run or do not run at enough 3.8GHz clock speed. However, this chip can still work quite well, and it would be a waste of time and money to throw it away. So this piece of silicon is “binned”, disabling some cores and branded as Core i5, where it is ready to compete with other chips.
Creating a processor is a complex, time-consuming, and expensive process. It’s one thing to throw away all those unsatisfactory but still functional CPUs and create a huge amount of waste. That’s why CPU manufacturing businesses use the binning process.
Also, keep in mind that different generations of CPUs may have different binning processes (or processes). The examples we mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only — that’s not necessarily what happens with every CPU generation.
How does Binning affect overclocking?
For anyone who doesn’t overclock their CPU, chip manufacturer binning or not doesn’t matter to them. You will receive a CPU that operates at the correct clock speed and core count you see on the box.
However, if you are interested in overclocking, binning can become a matter of “silicon lottery” as mentioned at the beginning of the article. In the past, there was a way to enable disabled cores to work again, but now this is extremely rare because the cores are physically disabled through the laser cutting process. A more common result is that the chip will operate at a higher frequency than expected.
This means that two Ryzen 7 processors sitting right next to each other on the shelf can have very different overclocking results. One may perform faster, but also run much hotter than usual, while the other performs as expected based on the processor’s acceleration speed.
Every CPU is different, that’s why it’s called a “lottery”. If you want to find out what you win in the “silicon lottery”, check out our overclocking guide. Readers should note that overclocking voids the CPU’s warranty. Because of this, “scratching silicon lottery tickets” is not for everyone. However, it might be worth it if your CPU is old and you consider this a “soft upgrade”. Even if you don’t care about overclocking, at least now you know what binning is!