[Elecraft] Experience with off brand Lithium AAs?

[Nick Waterman]

> When a line first begins making processors, the % of processors that 
> will pass all the highspeed tests low, while the % that will pass the
> lower speed tests is greater. So they are priced and spec'd so that 
> the entire run is (hopefully) bought up. If they priced 'em all the 
> same, there would be a shortage of highspeed processors and a surplus
> of lowspeed ones.

It's not just speed, either. Quite often large chunks of circuitry will
fail, so they'll be deliberately disabled ("fuses" on the chip are
deliberately blown, or even lasered off) and sold as a different model,
for example a 4Meg cache might have a microscopic speck of dust ruining
a few rows, so they disable that half of the cache and sell it as a 2Meg
cache version, or the really extreme case - you might have half a
dual-core CPU disabled and the other half sold as a single-core CPU.

It's much better than the alternative, where you used to get about 2
working chips off each wafer - frequently less than a 1% success ratio.

-- 
"Nosey" Nick Waterman, G7RZQ, K2 #5209.
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