Faulty Chips Might Just be 'Good Enough'

Ritalin16 writes "According to a Wired.com article, 'Consumer electronics could be a whole lot cheaper if chip manufacturers stopped throwing out all their defective chips, according to a researcher at the University of Southern California. Chip manufacturing is currently very wasteful. Between 20 percent and 50 percent of a manufacturer's total production is tossed or recycled because the chips contain minor imperfections. Defects in just one of the millions of tiny gates on a processor can doom the entire chip. But USC professor Melvin Breuer believes the imperfections are often too small for humans to even notice, especially when the chips are to be used in video and sound applications.' But just in case you do end up with a dead chip, here is a guide to making a CPU keychain."

"Good Enough"

[Anonymous Coward]

If ever a story was appropriate for Slashdot.

oh yes, by all means

[justins]

Don't throw away those "almost perfect" CPUs! Give them to needy people in the third world!

So they can remark them and sell them back to us...

Low cost solutions for the Military

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the supercomputers used for warfare and conflict analysis at the Pentegon and the CIA use these rejected chips.

In addition, they are used in the so-call "Star Wars" missle defense system prototype.

Although these chips don't actually work, the results are often good enough for their purposes.

Re:oh yes, by all means

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Don't throw away those "almost perfect" CPUs! Give them to needy people in the third world!

I think you mean the 2.99999999th world...

Re:Already being done...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm u9ing on} in my com%ute! an; I havea't nHticed+any pro~lems.

Processors? Or RAM?

[Transcendent]

I can see it for RAM, but for processors, I don't think so.

Though, you would probably have to make sure that certian important data for an audio or video clip are stored in *good* memory. Or else you could run into problems where a clip doesn't know where to end.

But, what are the odds that a null terminator gets messed up in meao90efghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ÇüéâäàåçêëèïîìÄÅÉæ ÆôöòûùÿÖÜ£¥áíóúñÑß±÷ !"#$%&'()*+,-./0Welcome to BankOne Online banking service! Your updated credit card number is 41
<<ERROR: Unexpected EOF >>

A bit error here...

[writermike]

A bit error here, A bit error there. Pretty soon you're talking about real crashes.

Sounds like Radio Shack parts

[Mac Mini Enthusiast]

Reminds of of the old joke about electronic compoment manufacturing fabs. They'll sort the parts coming off the assembly line into three bins, depending on how the testing of each part went :

Military Grade
Consumer Grade
Radio Shack

Re:"Good Enough"

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Enough - That's my motto. Don't tell my girlfriend.

Other news

[Frankie70]

In other news, flights would be much cheaper, if plane manufactures stopped Quality Control.

Re:Already commonplace with RAM chips

[CdBee]

I had to run the stupid thing at DDR266 speeds(133 mhz) with ridiculously high timings(something like 3-6-7-15) just to install WinXP. Good thing I was able to RMA that crap

You can RMA Windows XP?
Cool !

Re:Low cost solutions for the Military

[martin-boundary]

George Lucas also bought several of these defective chips when he worked on Episode 1. AFAIK, they were mostly used for animating the cool wookie character, Jar Jar Binks.