Friday, September 11th 2020
NVIDIA GeForce RTX Ampere Chips Feature Three Binning Tiers, Mostly Good Dies are Present
Chip binning is a process of sorting out the manufactured silicon by quality. That means that each chip that comes from the silicon wafer is tested and sorted by different features. For example, a chip is tested for how much voltage it takes for operation, how cool it runs, and of course how it overclocks. By putting their chips through various testing, manufacturers often create binning tiers, where they can differentiate good and bad chips, so they know where to send, and if they should send the chips. The biggest and most complex approach for sending chips is for graphics cards. As there are different AIBs, manufacturers like NVIDIA and AMD need to send them chips of various qualities to incorporate in their products. It is a rather time-consuming and complex process to find out the bin type and the tier of chips, however today we are getting some information from Igor's Lab.
According to their sources, it is said that NVIDIA's latest GeForce RTX Ampere lineup features three binning tiers. There is "Bin 0" which represents an okay chip that can perform as intended, "Bin 1" chips which are good processors, and "Bin 2" processors which represent the best quality chips with the highest performance characteristics. These "Bin 2" dies run cooler compared to the rest and achieve higher overclocking speed. In reality, the binning represents coordination between the chip designer (NVIDIA in this case) and the manufacturer (Samsung with its 8N 8 nm process). It is said that from the complete pilot run of Ampere chips, Samsung ends up with 30% of the "Bin 0" dies, 60% of "Bin 1" dies, and only 10% of "Bin 2" dies. The production period was quite short and these numbers are good for Samsung, as they probably didn't have much time to work on it, so we can expect these numbers to improve.
Source:
Igor's Lab
According to their sources, it is said that NVIDIA's latest GeForce RTX Ampere lineup features three binning tiers. There is "Bin 0" which represents an okay chip that can perform as intended, "Bin 1" chips which are good processors, and "Bin 2" processors which represent the best quality chips with the highest performance characteristics. These "Bin 2" dies run cooler compared to the rest and achieve higher overclocking speed. In reality, the binning represents coordination between the chip designer (NVIDIA in this case) and the manufacturer (Samsung with its 8N 8 nm process). It is said that from the complete pilot run of Ampere chips, Samsung ends up with 30% of the "Bin 0" dies, 60% of "Bin 1" dies, and only 10% of "Bin 2" dies. The production period was quite short and these numbers are good for Samsung, as they probably didn't have much time to work on it, so we can expect these numbers to improve.
66 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX Ampere Chips Feature Three Binning Tiers, Mostly Good Dies are Present
And since they actually label them differently, is it arguable ?, we had this with Turing so it's happening.
New news it's not.
Is that the case here? I didn't read it. In fact I didn't read anything much of substance here. Devil as always is in the details...
In the same vein, we 'had this with Turing' but all we really had was a set of chips that got blessed with higher TDP budgets alongside some vagueness about binning.
Hey look, if I tweak the power target with any Nvidia card with GPU Boost, I get different numbers too. We all know the boost algorithm finds space within the aforementioned TDP budget. A card sold with higher TDP budget simply has more headroom to boost, and that is what they managed to put on a box too. Wow. Such Binning. Much performance. :roll::roll::roll:
People oughta wake the f up...
They don't find the less leaky chips and pass those to the quadro team/buyer's?.
They then just have big bins of working and not working and it's lucky dip?.
Riiight, we disagree but do note I wasn't asleep , give yourself a nudge though, just check.
And of course there's binning. It's just that it won't matter to most consumers. Unless they want to pay more for a better-binned card. Which NVIDIA is perfectly within its rights to charge them extra for.
What will happen is that, since NVIDIA won't be able to sell 10% of its best-binned chips at a higher price (maybe 1%), most of them will end up going into the ordinary consumer pool, and the silicon lottery will work its democratic nature as always. In other words, it'll be just like Turing, and Pascal, and every series before...
Water is wet but here we are being led to believe something special is going on. OMG they have three tiers 'what if I get a bad one', 'how do I find a good one'...
Fake demand & clickbait. Look at the headline, 2nd part. 'Mostly good dies are present'... are we insinuating you might strike on a bad one with your purchase?! Nope... But its still in the title. Does this then mean most wafers are nearly perfect with just 'somewhat less perfect' dies on them? Obviously not. So what is it then?
So yes its all bullshit and many fools and money are involved. Any chip that is binned for a specific product is binned for that product, its the most basic thing since forever. I don't need to click links for that. Any time Nvidia thinks a specific die may go into another product, they actually tell you. We've had our share of GP104 movements for example with Pascal. We had A-dies with Turing. In neither case though did those qualify for a product that performed differently from the similar named one with a different chip inside. Even the so called remarkable Turing FE's needed a higher power target to 'be better'. Nuff said.
Yay @londiste I was talking bins for pro /enterprise not over clocking , it depends on the cooling too but none of that matters to enterprise, just performance ,TCO.. .