Author Topic: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!  (Read 6237 times)

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Offline etiTopic starter

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Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« on: September 05, 2020, 01:24:03 am »
I've just discovered that Sinclair DELIBERATELY bought in FAULTY RAM stock for the ZX Spectrum, where only half the RAM capacity worked, all to save a few pence... WHAT A CHEAP SKATE!

I absolutely couldn't live with myself, knowing I'd skimped on the BOM, just to make more money! Okay, so you save a few pence, but then, in the future, people like me will still be discussing what a skimper you are - UGH! I'd have that thought gnawing away at me, I couldn't let a designed product get into people's hands like that - and I don't care if it worked perfectly or not - YUCK!
 

Offline sleemanj

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #1 on: September 05, 2020, 01:42:38 am »
They only needed 32k and used 64k of ram in which half was faulty arranged so that the full 32k required was present.  It's not like the other half was advertised or supposed to be available, it wasn't, just unused.

They also sometimes found a machine that the 32k they needed didn't work, in which case they rebadged it as a 16k machine.

Not really any different to, for example, hard drive, SSD, flash memory where bad areas are marked  off in firmware.

Reduce, reuse, recycle.

Now if you want really dodgy, Amstrad (I think it was Amstrad) fitted completely fake ram and circuit board onto their computer to sell it into, I think Spain, or Portugal, which had a minimum memory requirement, the ram they fitted was completely bogus not connected in any meaningful way to the computer electrically!
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Offline IanB

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #2 on: September 05, 2020, 01:45:14 am »
I've got to ask, were you a potential buyer of a Spectrum when they were first on the market? If you had a choice between buying a computer or not buying a computer, would you have passed up on the Spectrum because you would rather save up for more expensive options?

And be sure to understand that if you bought a computer with 16 K of RAM, you would get 16 K of working RAM. If you only got 8 K when 16 K was promised, the consumer protection people would have been upon on them like a ton of bricks. The UK has always had strong consumer protection laws.
 

Offline etiTopic starter

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #3 on: September 05, 2020, 01:50:40 am »
I've got to ask, were you a potential buyer of a Spectrum when they were first on the market? If you had a choice between buying a computer or not buying a computer, would you have passed up on the Spectrum because you would rather save up for more expensive options?

And be sure to understand that if you bought a computer with 16 K of RAM, you would get 16 K of working RAM. If you only got 8 K when 16 K was promised, the consumer protection people would have been upon on them like a ton of bricks. The UK has always had strong consumer protection laws.

"The UK has always had strong consumer protection laws."

Yes, I know, I am English  ;)
 

Online Ian.M

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #4 on: September 05, 2020, 02:12:20 am »
It led to interesting mods like this one that created an 80K RAM rubber key speccy!
http://blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2020/03/a-zx-spectrum-with-80k-of-ram.html
 

Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #5 on: September 05, 2020, 03:00:56 am »
Shrug, I deliberately bought a 6-core desktop CPU.  Because it's cheaper than the 8-core, and doesn't offer much less performance for my applications.  I don't care if it's the same die and the extra bits are just deactivated (whether for sales or technical reasons).

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Offline drussell

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #6 on: September 05, 2020, 03:11:10 am »
I've just discovered that Sinclair DELIBERATELY bought in FAULTY RAM stock for the ZX Spectrum, where only half the RAM capacity worked, all to save a few pence... WHAT A CHEAP SKATE!

I absolutely couldn't live with myself, knowing I'd skimped on the BOM, just to make more money! Okay, so you save a few pence, but then, in the future, people like me will still be discussing what a skimper you are - UGH! I'd have that thought gnawing away at me, I couldn't let a designed product get into people's hands like that - and I don't care if it worked perfectly or not - YUCK!

Erm...  OK...

So, if you owned a fab 30 or 40 years ago, what exactly would you propose to do with your paartially-working, (for the time,) high density dies?!

Edit:  And, alternatively, why is it Sinclair's fault for trying to get the lowest possible BOM for a mass-market, budget product? 

What would you do?
Increase your sales price by $10, $15, $20?  Just to get 100% functional, premium RAM chips... 
Why?  What would that accomplish in the end?!
You're insane.  :)

Apparently you weren't actually doing computing in the 70s and 80s... 
Even simple, early, slow DRAM was incredibly expensive... Don't even talk about SRAM...
« Last Edit: September 05, 2020, 03:16:18 am by drussell »
 
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Offline greenpossum

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #7 on: September 05, 2020, 04:19:54 am »
So much righteousness...  :-)
 

Offline Brumby

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #8 on: September 05, 2020, 04:32:43 am »
The OP is missing the point.

As others have said - There are two ways of achieving X amount of RAM ... buying first quality chips that provide X - or buying higher capacity chips that may have faults, but can still provide X.


If you were building a new product using new, developing technology (especially where cost reflects this), I would suggest you look at your BOM cost and see which way you would jump.


I also question how someone could be outraged at a machine being offered with X amount of RAM gets delivered with X amount of functional RAM.
So much righteousness...  :-)
Indeed.
 

Offline Bud

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #9 on: September 05, 2020, 05:43:45 am »
I have never heard about it causing any problems to the end users. So what was the problem.  :-// .None.
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Online Fraser

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #10 on: September 05, 2020, 06:47:50 am »
As has already been stated, The Spectrum comes from the early days of home computing and bears little resemblance to the current market. The computers were relatively simple but parts, such as the DRAM, were very expensive. As you needed 8 or more DRAM Chips, their individual cost impacted upon the total BoM cost significantly. Manufacturers of home computers were actually grateful to the DRAM fabs for making grade B DRAM available to them at discounted prices. It was a very new and very different computing world back then. We, as users, were grateful for every 1K a manufacturer could provide at reasonable cost. The 48K Spectrum had a distinct sales advantage over the competition with smaller memory capacity, such as the VIC20 and Dragon 32. I was a Dragon 32 user and I modified that platform with greater DRAM etc. The 32K and 64K DRAM was very expensive at the time. I went in to repair Spectrum computers for a computer retailer as a favour to them and still have the schematics somewhere. I did see DRAM failures but that was not uncommon in that era. The worst faults were often in ASIC’s that were both expensive and hard to source, except from other faulty Computers. The ZX81 had an ASIC that regularly popped its clogs for no apparent reason. At the time there was also a practice of swapping out DRAM chips one at a time until the fault disappeared !

As I said, a very different era to now and home computing was a new frontier and some unusual production practices were employed to ‘get the job done’. The consumer just wanted a home computer, how the manufacturer created it was of little interest, provided it worked. Dragon Data was no different and they were even accused of stealing the Radio Shack MC6809E based CoCo design for the Dragon....... it did look awfully similar at the schematic level  ;) It was so similar that CoCo schematics, programming manuals and programs were mostly compatible  ;D ‘Wild West’ Frontier days  :-+ Great fun for those of us who grew up during that era in computing. At school I was working on Commodore CBM PET’s and Z80 Research Machine platforms. A home computer such as a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore VIC20 or Dragon 32 was amazing to us at the time. To get 32K in a Dragon seemed impressive at the time. The 48K of the ZX Spectrum was a source of envy for many of us, so we upgraded our Dragon 32’s to 64K through modifications and upgrades. IIRC the Dragon 32 used ‘half good’ DRAM and when fully enabled it often worked fine in its full capacity. Grade B rejects sometimes failed speed tests but actually worked OK. A second bank of ‘half good’ 64K DRAM could also be added to make 64K. Oh fun times and I miss the simplicity of 8 bit computers.

Now if you really want to poke fun at the Sinclair Spectrum...... go after that daft calculator style rubber keyboard ! Compared to the Dragon 32’s real keyboard, it was a joke and looked like a toy. Such a pity as the computer was actually much better than it looked. I used to fit ZXSpectrum+ cases to standard Spectrum’s as an upgrade to the case and keyboard. Still not a real keyboard feel though.

Thanks for taking my mind back to happy days for me as a School kid, and then Student, working on 8 bit computers in my spare time :-+

Fraser

« Last Edit: September 05, 2020, 06:54:27 am by Fraser »
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Online tggzzz

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #11 on: September 05, 2020, 06:52:39 am »
I've just discovered that Sinclair DELIBERATELY bought in FAULTY RAM stock for the ZX Spectrum, where only half the RAM capacity worked, all to save a few pence... WHAT A CHEAP SKATE!

I absolutely couldn't live with myself, knowing I'd skimped on the BOM, just to make more money! Okay, so you save a few pence, but then, in the future, people like me will still be discussing what a skimper you are - UGH! I'd have that thought gnawing away at me, I couldn't let a designed product get into people's hands like that - and I don't care if it worked perfectly or not - YUCK!

Sinclair a cheapskate? News at 10.

Sinclair's products were always dodgy, from his first audio kits in the 60s onwards. Have a look at an insider's view: http://diy.torrens.org/Sinclair/inside/Duncan.php
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Online Fraser

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #12 on: September 05, 2020, 06:56:08 am »
Sinclair was a boffin, an ideas man. He should have left design and production to those who specialised in turning ideas into reality.

To be fair to Sinclair as a company though, they were providing what consumers wanted and, as already stated, that sometimes required ‘bush engineering’ or ‘Wild West’ practices when it came to designs and components used. Very different times when electronics was often less ‘polished’ than what we have come to expect these days.

Fraser
« Last Edit: September 05, 2020, 07:00:14 am by Fraser »
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Offline Kjelt

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #13 on: September 05, 2020, 07:24:11 am »
As I said, a very different era to now
Small cough
Yes but some things don't change, cutting BOM is one of them.
In 2009 I got an assignment to purchase microcontrollers for a mass market product. To meet their target BOM the uC had to be <$0,10.
In that time that was insane. The cheapest china uC was $0,22 per million pcs.
So after a while one of our productmanagers gave me a chinese contact for a million uCs for $0,05 / pc.
I investigated and what was the story, these were 4 bit uC for toys where the ram was partly faulty. The contact had written a small program that on first run tests all ram locations and mark the bad ones if the bad ones were less than the good ones or the good ones when the good ones were less than the bad ones.
No need to say we passed but these things are used in cheap toys.
 
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Offline VK3DRB

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #14 on: September 05, 2020, 09:33:01 am »
Yeah its not good to know you were ripped off.

There was a prominent but dodgy clone computer seller in Melbourne selling PC's with "external cache". He simply loaded dummy chips on the motherboard with fake cache markings and hacked the BIOS to report cache that was not there. The chips actually contained no semiconductor material inside. Added to that, he sold computers advertised with fake clock speeds. eg: 80386SX-27, when they were only clocked at 20 MHz.
 

Offline chris_leyson

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #15 on: September 05, 2020, 09:55:54 am »
A long time ago I had heard that the Sinclair Micromatic had used cheaper out of spec transistors, not sure whether it was true or not and it could easily have been confused with the Micro-FM radio which used out of spec transistors because their gain was too high. See link to Richard Torrens page below. I could never get my Mk2 Micromatic to work, it might have been my soldering or a bad ME4102 transistor. Clever bit of design for a reflex TRF though. The mica compression trimmer was a classic. I used a Sinclair Scientific calculator for a while but its accuracy wasn't that good and there was a calculator shoot out published in ETI magazine. The Commodore SR-1800 came out as the winner and I've still got mine somewhere, used the Sinlcair for its multiplexed LED display. http://diy.torrens.org/Sinclair/inside/Duncan.php
 

Offline Brumby

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #16 on: September 05, 2020, 10:50:49 am »
..... had used cheaper out of spec transistors

Here's the thing - Something described as "out of spec" simply has parameters that are not within the range defined by the designer - BUT - that doesn't necessarily mean those parameters will be outside the range of functionality for a particular application.  It is not inconceivable to produce a widget which contains out of spec components and still work.  Sinclair's RAM exercise being one example.  This could also apply to, say, a transistor whose maximum voltage is specified at 25V, can't handle more than 15V but is going to work fine in a 9V circuit.  In this case, replacement with an "in spec" part should restore operation.

I daresay you could then have a component that is "out of spec" - but it is one of those out of spec parameters that enables it to function in a particular circuit.  Here, replacement with an "in spec" part will not restore function.

"In spec" is not as important as "suitable for purpose".
 

Online tggzzz

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #17 on: September 05, 2020, 11:25:33 am »
..... had used cheaper out of spec transistors

Here's the thing - Something described as "out of spec" simply has parameters that are not within the range defined by the designer - BUT - that doesn't necessarily mean those parameters will be outside the range of functionality for a particular application.  It is not inconceivable to produce a widget which contains out of spec components and still work.  Sinclair's RAM exercise being one example.  This could also apply to, say, a transistor whose maximum voltage is specified at 25V, can't handle more than 15V but is going to work fine in a 9V circuit.  In this case, replacement with an "in spec" part should restore operation.

I daresay you could then have a component that is "out of spec" - but it is one of those out of spec parameters that enables it to function in a particular circuit.  Here, replacement with an "in spec" part will not restore function.

"In spec" is not as important as "suitable for purpose".

Absolutely, but the reason you buy parts which 'meet spec' is so you can design to those specs.

If you buy factory rejects like Sinclair did, then there's no guarantee that they will perform the same even in the same batch, never mind the next batch, it pushes up production cost because you have to 'select on test' for every product and it reduces reliability drastically.

It also makes repair far more difficult because there's no guarantee you can buy the re-marked parts, no guarantee you will get one that matches the foibles of the unit you're repairing and no guarantee you can find out which other components to change to make it work...

It's fine to buy bags of reject parts as a hobbyist, it used to be a big market and pretty much every electronics mag was teeming with ads for 'bargain bags' of factory reject components, you bought by weight not quantity, for production, it's a stupid trick that can wreck your reputation.

I still have some of those "BC108-like" transistors :)

The insider in http://diy.torrens.org/Sinclair/inside/Duncan.php notes that Sinclair's business model included large numbers of "return and get your money back", and that the Sinclair staff could often rescue the kit. When they did that they offered the punter the their money or their fixed kit, and the punters were often grateful.
There are lies, damned lies, statistics - and ADC/DAC specs.
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Offline Berni

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #18 on: September 05, 2020, 11:37:16 am »
Its pretty common for companies to sell partially working silicon chips for cheaper in order to avoid just tossing them in the trash.

Pretty much all the SD cards you have contain just partly working flash inside. Due to the push for density the yield is awful on flash memory. So even the top tier cards have some leftover capacity hidden away to cover the dead pages. The chips with too many dead areas are instead sold as half capacity memory chips.

AMD used to sell 3 core CPUs. Why would they make a 3 core chip? Because these are actually 4 core chips with one of the cores dead, but the chip is designed to easily disable that core.

Nvidia does this commonly where the xx70 models (2070 1070 970...) are actually the same GPUs that are used in the higher xx80 models(2080 1080 980...) except that too many cores are dead, so they disable a certain number of cores and sell it off as the lower model.

Even 100% working chips are binned. For example intel sells the same CPU die under multiple partnumbers depending on how well it did on the final test stage. If a chip is seen to perform better under high clock speeds it is sold as the overclocking K variant, if the chip fails the test at normal speed but passes the test at a lower clock speed then it is sold as a lower clocked model. If a chip shows particularly low power usage then it is sold as the low power S or T variant.
 

Online vk6zgo

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #19 on: September 05, 2020, 11:39:34 am »
Many BJTs are/were allocated their type number, depending on their measured beta.
If you buy the base model car, it has many of the "bits" from the upmarket ones, just not used, so what's the difference?

 
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Offline T3sl4co1l

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #20 on: September 05, 2020, 12:46:45 pm »
If the parts were actually useless, they would've been trashed.  The fact that they were sold and used is proof that they weren't useless.

Not that unscrupulous sellers don't exist either, but again, see above.  When there are regulatory forces in place to prevent that, you get a well functioning market.

There's plenty of history of this, of actually trashing parts that don't meet spec.  Manufacturers aren't afraid to do it.  There are plenty of photos of, for example, mounds of finished vacuum tubes, to be crushed and disposed of (or hopefully recycled?).  Selling dysfunctional parts would be more harmful to their reputation than the value of those parts, even if sold through appropriate channels (or indeed, the cost of setting up that "budget"/off-spec/relabel sales channel wouldn't be worth its revenues).

A better concern would be if they were reliable, at whatever capacity they had.  I don't know about the chips in question, but it's generally the case that semiconductors don't change much over time (aside from exposure to ESD, which is avoidable in finished products by appropriate design).  It's a good guess that, within that available capacity, they're fine, functionally indistinguishable from a chip of the same (design) size.  That is, the defect happens to cause a few memory bits, or cells, or decoders or whatever, to malfunction, but the rest of the chip is and shall remain perfectly functional aside from that.

I don't know what's difficult about understanding that.

It's like I sold you a car that, by all indication is supposed to have a 4-cylinder engine in it, but I actually put in a V8, but I did a shitty job tuning it so it only makes the power of a 4-cylinder anyway (and yes, assuming other circumstances are comparable, like equal mileage -- maybe it's just not getting enough fuel or something, so it's somehow just as efficient, but only delivers half max power).  And you're complaining that I've somehow defrauded you, but you're getting a car exactly as described.

Tim
« Last Edit: September 05, 2020, 12:52:25 pm by T3sl4co1l »
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Online Ian.M

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #21 on: September 05, 2020, 12:54:48 pm »
He was sold half-working 64Kbit DRAMs at a significant discount, certainly less than the price of two 16Kbit DRAMs.  If he'd been a little bit cleverer, he'd have figured out how to use 48K of them and do away with the bank of 16Kbit DRAMs that comprised the base 16K as mostly the defects would have been quite localized, so if they'd been tested and binned by defect page,  with two XOR gates on DRAM A6 and A7 and two jumpers to select which 16K page not to use, he could have used 3/4 of each chip.  However he'd already maxed out the 40 pins of the ULA,  I'm not sure if it had enough gates left, and it would have impacted performance as all the RAM would have been contended with the ULA video controller.  The refresh design might have also been a bit hairy as natively, the Z80 only provides a seven bit refresh address.  Maybe Clive wanted to do it that way and either the pressures of time to market, or Richard Altwasser's good sense killed it off.
 

Online Monkeh

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #22 on: September 05, 2020, 01:14:02 pm »
And if you think that doesn't go on today at the fab level, you're kidding yourself.

We all know the basic structure of DRAM - one transistor and one capacitor per bit. Not including muxes and all the other supporting circuitry. So I just added up all the RAM in my daily-use x86 machines, excluding GPU VRAM, phones, tablets, and so forth. 126GiB of it. One trillion, 82 billion, 331 million, 758 thousand, 592 transistor/cap pairs, if my math isn't off.

Somehow, I suspect I've got quite a bit of unused partially-faulty DRAM around me. Just a feeling..

Oh, and all those cheap off-brand (or just lesser brand..) SSDs out there with no markings or custom markings on the flash? Parts which failed to meet OEM specs. Sold off, tested (maybe..) to much lower standards and sold to you.
 
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Offline wraper

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #23 on: September 05, 2020, 01:30:53 pm »
Basically all modern DRAM, NAND and camera sensors have faults in them. One in a thousand of chips might have no defects at all. DRAM defects are hidden on the chip level by using spare rows/columns. Or even half of the chip may be disabled and sold as smaller size. NAND defects usually are managed on controller level. Camera defects are dealt with in image processing software. CPUs/GPUs often have parts of them disabled to increase yield and sold as lower tier parts. Some have some part disabled even in the top tier chip. Say PS3 CPU has 8 cores physically but one of them is always disabled to increase yield.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2020, 01:36:30 pm by wraper »
 

Offline Berni

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Re: Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!
« Reply #24 on: September 05, 2020, 01:37:12 pm »
Its pretty common for companies to sell partially working silicon chips for cheaper in order to avoid just tossing them in the trash.

Pretty much all the SD cards you have contain just partly working flash inside. Due to the push for density the yield is awful on flash memory. So even the top tier cards have some leftover capacity hidden away to cover the dead pages. The chips with too many dead areas are instead sold as half capacity memory chips.

AMD used to sell 3 core CPUs. Why would they make a 3 core chip? Because these are actually 4 core chips with one of the cores dead, but the chip is designed to easily disable that core.

Nvidia does this commonly where the xx70 models (2070 1070 970...) are actually the same GPUs that are used in the higher xx80 models(2080 1080 980...) except that too many cores are dead, so they disable a certain number of cores and sell it off as the lower model.

Even 100% working chips are binned. For example intel sells the same CPU die under multiple partnumbers depending on how well it did on the final test stage. If a chip is seen to perform better under high clock speeds it is sold as the overclocking K variant, if the chip fails the test at normal speed but passes the test at a lower clock speed then it is sold as a lower clocked model. If a chip shows particularly low power usage then it is sold as the low power S or T variant.

This is all by design though, Sinclair bought parts which would otherwise have ended up in the trash.

Well this is done with flash too.

Some flash silicon come off the manufacturing line so bad that the actual manufacturers like Micron, Samsung..etc don't want to bother with it. So there are companies out there that make it a business of buying the crap flash dies from the big players on the cheep. Putting them trough more extensive testing to patch up the bad memory areas[Note 1], packaging them into chips and selling it.

A lot of of the really cheep off brand SSDs have such waste reclaimed flash in them.

EDIT:
Note 1: To clarify expressed concerns for confusion, this process of "patching up bad memory" involves writing down the block as being bad by writing this information into the flash memory before it leaves the factory. This does not involve somehow repairing the incredibly tiny silicon structure on the die.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2020, 03:44:53 pm by Berni »
 


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