Snapdragon 800 Benchmarks

[ShleeDragon]

Chase that dragon!

 

[Exophase]

Mmm...  maybe to save power, maybe more likely to differentiate product lineup?

Use the same process to produce both parts.  One gets used in phones and tablets (32bit only).  The other gets put in embedded systems and high density server clusters (64bit).

Think about it - if a certain % of CPUs fail, then some are going to fail in a critical area (deal) others are going to fail in an area or core that can be 'shut off' and then still sell the chip as a lesser product.  In this hypothetical case, only the 'perfect' ones go into the server (Xeon?) lineup.

Now, the big question - would the chips put into the server (Xeon) lineup still retain their otherwise vestigial mobile device capabilities? It could be entertaining to have a handheld mobile device with a 64bit Xeon CPU and 32GB RAM and blah blah blah...  Of course the CPU part could very well cost $1000 or more at that point.

If the 32bit 22nm SOC is viable and competitive to same availabilty ARM from a perf/watt, cost and max thermal perspective - I don't see any reason to exclude it.

Binning by disabling features that are defective is indeed a usual process, but I doubt they get failures that's specifically limited to 64-bit support. This support is little bits sprinkled throughout the core, it's not something like disabling an entire core, a integrated GPU, or a big chunk of cache - these are the only things I'm aware of Intel binning by defect. They do artificially fuse pretty much everything else under the sun, but that's usually not because it doesn't work.