A new CPU family known as the AMD Ryzen was released earlier this year. These are basically CPU’s with very powerful integrated graphics built in. The current variants run at 65w; however it was announced that 35w versions would be released later. Many speculate they (35w) will only be for the OEM market.
That said one comment that keeps popping up is how these 35w versions are really 65w CPU’s that failed some sort of QA test. Is there any truth to this? From my point of view either a CPU functions or it doesn’t. I was led to believe AMD had purposely done something internally to restrict to 35w.
Every cpu has multiple cores on the die. Sinve cpus are so small the yield rate of perfect cpus isn’t very high. So to make up for this they grade every cpu and when one has a core or two that can’t hit the benchmark quality they lazer pver the cpu to prevent it from working and then sell the product as a 6,4 or 2 core cpu. This is actually good for most people since multithreading isn’t utilized that much so the average user won’t see any performance differance between the cheap 6 vs 8 core.
It’s not really defective cpus, but just different tdp for different applications. Oem systems tend to run in harsher conditions / in laptops where saving energy and outputing less heat are welcome.