[HN Gopher] Silicon Lottery Closing Down
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Silicon Lottery Closing Down
Author : dtx1
Score : 62 points
Date : 2021-09-30 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (siliconlottery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (siliconlottery.com)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Silicon Lottery was great. Perhaps oddly I never used them for
| any of my desktops rather a few laptops. I'd get the top binned
| CPU I could buy from them and tweak the clocks so that single
| core was OC'd to the max and multi core was relatively close to
| stock but undervolted. This kept fans from going nuts without
| having to sacrifice a great deal of performance.
|
| I really wanted to get my 5950X through them but the shortages at
| the time made it hard enough to get one at all and they
| eventually gave up even trying to list them.
| chacham15 wrote:
| So, for those of you that dont know what this is a simplified
| explanation is: silicon lottery does a few things. 1. You can buy
| processors which have lower defect rates and are therefore much
| better at overclocking than others of the same type. 2. You can
| get extra services like delidding which is normally done to
| improve thermal transfer making it easier to overclock and keep
| the system cool. The benefits of these have been decreasing over
| time and with chip shortages as well, the lottery is closing
| down.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| While it's sad that they are closing, there is a positive take
| here: there is less need for such a service, because A) there is
| less variation among processors, so you know pretty much exactly
| what you are getting and don't need third-party binning to get
| top performance, and B) Intel has improved their Thermal
| Interface Material (TIM), so there's no need for delidding.
| Basically, CPU performance increased and grew more consistent, so
| you don't need a third-party provider to pick out the good ones
| for you.
| heydabop wrote:
| > there is less variation among processors
|
| Definitely, to the point where it feels like they're breaking
| up their product line to further narrow this variation, or at
| least that felt like the case with the i9-10850K vs the
| i9-10900K.
| shadilay wrote:
| I had a feeling they we're going to close a month ago when I
| checked and they didn't have inventory.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Overclocking, in my humble opinion, was always a sign of
| inefficiency from a manufacturing perspective. If the
| manufacturer was nearly-perfectly efficient at manufacturing and
| binning, almost none of their chips should have any overclocking
| headroom because they came out at their limits from the
| beginning.
| xondono wrote:
| The original margin for overclocking was in fact a result of
| being efficient.
|
| Let's say you build 1000 chips and bin them in two categories
| 900 came out near peak performance. Then you get orders for 200
| of the top performance item, and 700 of the low tier. What are
| you supposed to do? Build another 7k chips and store the high
| performing ones?
|
| The obvious solution, pick 600 top performing chips, relabel
| them as low tier, sell them at lower margin, and if needed you
| can start the next batch.
|
| From computer accesories to top tier processors, the problem is
| not in profit margins, is in cashflows.
| acchow wrote:
| This sounds like a company that is very bad at predicting
| demand. Presumably in 2021, Intel can predict relative demand
| between its product bins quite accurately?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The fact is that the demand for the high end is always much
| lower than successful chips and they need to have a
| sizeable gap to justify those chips.
|
| Also yields and bins improve significantly over a product
| cycle so it's not set in stone.
| bserge wrote:
| Yep, that seems to be the case with AMD today. Intel, too, even
| though their chips still seem to have more room for
| overclocking (if you win the silicon lottery).
| [deleted]
| leetcrew wrote:
| not necessarily. the "limits" exist in the context of
| reasonable cooling solutions and the power delivery
| capabilities of the cheapest supported motherboard. if intel
| could assume everyone had overbuilt VRMs and a 360mm radiator,
| they could push their top SKU further up the voltage/frequency
| curve.
|
| part of why overclocking is dying out is because of the
| increasingly sophisticated boosting rules for modern CPUs.
| traditionally, you would just set all cores to run at the same
| speed 24/7 and go as far as you could under that regime. if you
| try than with zen 3, you won't be able to hit max 1T boost. I
| believe you are able to set per-core overclocks with zen 3, but
| not sure if anyone does that in practice.
| froggertoaster wrote:
| I feel like this service came several years too late. The
| overclocking community seemed much bigger 10-15 years ago.
| mrb wrote:
| How about 20 years ago? Remember the Celeron 300 MHz which
| could be easily overclocked +50%(!) to 450 MHz?
| cmsj wrote:
| Heck yeah, and it supported SMP. I had two of them running on
| an ABit BP6 motherboard as my Linux workstation. Good times.
| 55873445216111 wrote:
| AMD and Intel have gotten much better at pushing the stock CPU
| frequencies up to the actual process limits as compared to 10
| years ago. Also the various Turbo boost features now
| automatically push it even further towards the limits when
| there is thermal headroom. Therefore, there is hardly very much
| headroom left on the table anymore for overclockers.
|
| In 2009 I overclocked my i7 920 from 2.66GHz stock to 4.2GHz
| fully stable with custom water-cooling. More recently I have
| used i7 7700k and Ryzen 5950X under custom water-cooling and
| manual overclocking gets you less than 10% at most. Hardly even
| worth it. Just keep the CPU cool and let the built in boost
| features work.
| snuxoll wrote:
| There's also the issue that newer cores run much hotter than
| ever before. The chiplets in my new Ryzen 7 5800X are so
| small that even my custom water loop can only do so much with
| the temperatures as there just isn't enough surface area for
| thermal transfer. I was honestly worried that I was
| repeatedly messed up the mount of the CPU block, thermal
| paste application, or that one or both were just bad when I
| fired up HWInfo64 and did a burn-in test; my old Ryzen 5
| 1600X didn't get near as hot on a 240MM AIO when overclocked
| as the 5800X does doing normal boosting on a 360+240mm custom
| loop.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the community has grown, simply by the increase
| of number of users alone. Extreme overclocking, which this
| service caters to, seems to have shrunken, though. Probably
| because of dimishing returns.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It probably mattered a lot more 10-15 years ago. A modern CPUs
| toward the higher end of consumer grade equipment is so
| powerful it's ridiculous.
| potatolicious wrote:
| The delidding service wouldn't have made sense back then - the
| whole phenomenon arose only a few years ago when Intel changed
| the TIM material to something substantially worse than what you
| could get on the market.
|
| It's still not clear to me why they did that.
|
| But in any case, suddenly the thermal performance of Intel CPUs
| dropped significantly, which gave rise to the de-lidding
| phenomenon.
|
| Now that Intel has switched back to a better TIM the era
| necessarily is over.
|
| 10-15 years ago folks did more overclocking but there wasn't
| really a need to de-lid, it was more about heat dissipation via
| elaborate cooling setups than messing with the chip package
| itself.
| wheybags wrote:
| There is still some performance gains to be had by removing
| the IHS and placing the cold plate of your cooler straight on
| the die (and even crazy shit like lapping the die), but yeah,
| the major reason was intel's bad paste under the ihs.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >The overclocking community seemed much bigger 10-15 years ago.
|
| Now you're making me nostalgic. 10-15 years ago was both my
| teenage years and the end of the overclocking golden era. I
| remember overclocking the living shit out of all kinds of Core2
| stuff without anything except a stock cooler and a modest
| voltage bump that was still within Intel's "safe"
| recommendations.
|
| One of the best gains was with an E5200 I spend around $120 on
| brand new. Bumped that up from 2.5GHz to 3.8GHz and the
| performance was closer to a then-$300 E8400 than the low end
| Pentium I'd purchased.
|
| The last CPU I overclocked was an i7 2600k, which was my daily
| driver until last year (!!!).
|
| On one hand, I miss that crazy era, but on the other hand I
| understand why it had to go away. Intel just don't have the
| sheer performance advantage to be able to gimp their own chips
| like that any more.
|
| Edit: Just remembered some of the gimping AMD did, like the HD
| 6950 that could be upgraded to a 6970 with nothing but a BIOS
| flash, and the "3-core" Phenoms with a 4th core that could be
| unlocked in the BIOS.
| Svperstar wrote:
| I miss the era of the Celeron 300 mhz overclocked to 450 mhz.
| Was a time of rapid change.
| ericd wrote:
| Yeah, it was such an easy overclock, too, bumping the
| frontside bus from 66 MHz to 100 MHz. And suddenly your
| budget chip could hang with much, much more expensive
| chips.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Does anyone know what they did with the "losing" chips, the ones
| they bought that didn't turn out to be positive outliers? Seems
| very tricky to get this financially viable, since 90% of chips
| will just be average. At least I assume so?
| Sebb767 wrote:
| It seems the resold them cheaper [0]. Unfortunately, all prices
| are zeroed, so it's hard to tell by how much and whether it was
| below retail.
|
| [0]
| https://siliconlottery.com/collections/cometlake/products/10...
| (see the description, 100% of CPUs reached this).
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| I'm not knowledge on CPU prices, but looking at their prices
| from January [1] , it looks like you could save around 10%
| off retail if you used them to get the "losing" chips.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210116175309/https://silico
| nlo...
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| I still see prices at
| https://siliconlottery.com/collections/all
|
| Intel Core i9 11900K @ 4.9GHz Boxed Processor $ 519.99
|
| Intel Core i9 11900K @ 5.0GHz Boxed Processor Sale price $
| 499.99 Regular price $ 579.99 Save $ 80
|
| Intel Core i9 11900K @ 5.1GHz Boxed Processor Regular price $
| 779.99
|
| Intel Core i9 11900KF @ 4.9GHz Boxed Processor Regular price
| $ 499.99
|
| Intel Core i9 11900KF @ 5.0GHz Boxed Processor Regular price
| $ 559.99
|
| Intel Core i9 11900KF @ 5.1GHz Boxed Processor Sale price $
| 639.99 Regular price $ 759.99
|
| The discounted ones are the only ones not marked sold out.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Resell them as average?
| Grustaf wrote:
| Yeah, but will they even make a profit on those? I mean
| presumably people who just want a normal processor would
| prefer to get it from a more well known shop, so they can't
| even charge market price for them.
|
| Plus their "normal" chips are actually worse than your
| average market chip, since they removed the good ones.
|
| But maybe the margins are high, so they didn't lose money on
| those.
| withinrafael wrote:
| "Delidding" is the process of removing the lid--the shiny
| exterior metal integrated heat spreader (IHS)--and replacing the
| thermal interface material (TIM) between the CPU die and the
| spreader. This is done in hopes to reduce operating temperatures
| and increase overclocking potential. This is similar to the
| process of scraping off the stock TIM on a retail heatsink. This
| procedure can be difficult to perform; Silicon Lottery provided a
| premium service for interested customers.
|
| Silicon Lottery also provided "bin" identification services [1]
| via frequency tests and sold desirable highest quality/lowest
| defect chips (hence the company name, I presume). Processor
| "binning", overly simplified, is a process of testing and sorting
| processors into various bins (e.g. best performance, lowest
| defects vs. decent performance, some defects, etc). That
| explanation doesn't do the process justice but should give you an
| idea.
|
| [1] https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics
| dcow wrote:
| Yep and with Intel shitting the process bed all they can do is
| bin their existing stuff better, add some more aggressive
| boosting, and sell it as i9. They're essentially stuck
| "overclocking" their own chips.
| techrat wrote:
| To the point to where you often could get better performance
| UNDERCLOCKING what Intel sold you. Often to the amount of 1%
| less performance but also 15% less power draw.
| heydabop wrote:
| > you often could get better performance UNDERCLOCKING
|
| > often to the amount of 1% less performance
|
| That doesn't sound like better performance to me. Better
| performance per watt maybe, but then if I'm buying an i9
| chip I'm probably not chasing performance per watt.
| techrat wrote:
| You miss the whole issue with Intel's CPUs.
|
| How much power they draw.
|
| They hit thermal throttle quite often. Especially the
| high end chips where Intel is maximizing the clock to bin
| them as i9s.
|
| 1% overall decrease in performance to ensure a lower
| power draw overall to prevent reaching thermal throttling
| thresholds absolutely does equate to better performance.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I guess that would depend on how
| efficient your cooling is, no?
| techrat wrote:
| Intel has been misrepresenting the TDP requirements of
| their CPUs for some time.
|
| https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319402-intels-
| desktop-...
|
| Something they list as 65W can draw over 200 Watts at
| full load.
|
| Consider that even with the most high end CPUs, they
| include the copper slug stock coolers than can make even
| a 45W rated CPU thermal throttle.
|
| > For most of the 2010s, Intel kept its typical desktop
| CPU power consumption at or below the CPU's rated TDP,
| even at peak power draw. Once AMD launched Ryzen and
| Intel had to start adding more CPU cores to its desktop
| parts, that changed. The Core i9-10850K draws up to 265W
| but claims a 125W TDP. The Core i7-10700 claims 65W, but
| draws up to 214W under load, at motherboard defaults.
|
| In effect, Intel is brute forcing performance by cranking
| the power draw way up in order to compensate for what AMD
| has been able to bring to the table. They're bulldozering
| their way out of this mess, basically. The end result is
| that Intel is already pushing their chips to near maximum
| performance, power efficiency be damned, leaving zero
| room for overclocking... as the reason for this article
| exists.
| RachelF wrote:
| And AMD is also overclocking their own chips now.
|
| The days of running a chip 20% faster are gone - now with
| much tweaking you'll get a few percent gain and way more
| power draw.
|
| All this makes the Apple M1 chip look amazing, for single
| core loads it matches the best AMD and Intel have to offer.
| teamspirit wrote:
| If only we could add a real GPU.
| dcow wrote:
| I wish the eGPU scene was a little more refined and
| mature. It was almost there with Intel thunderbolt but
| with the M1 we've got an entirely new thunderbolt
| implementation that barely supports (pretty sure it still
| doesn't without something like display link) more than
| one external display for what I can only imagine is a
| hardware limitation. It seems like we always almost get
| there and then something new comes along and everyone
| chases that instead.
| 0x4863A0 wrote:
| Can someone explain what this is/was?
| w-ll wrote:
| Looks as if they bought CPUs and did their own
| benchmarks/binning and resold them based of their measured
| performance.
| CivBase wrote:
| Looks like you could mail them a CPU and pay them to upgrade
| the thermal compound under the IHS and optionally test it to
| determine maximum stable overclock parameters.
|
| It looks like they also binned high-end CPUs. For those not
| familiar, that means they tested each CPU to determine its
| maximum stable overclock, then re-sold them with a markup on
| the fastest ones.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| CPUs sold under the same name can have substantial differences
| in their overclocking headroom. Back when variation was larger,
| purchasing a new CPU was thus participating in the "silicon
| lottery", at least if you wanted to OC.
|
| The siliconlottery site used to buy a whole lot of CPUs, test
| them, determine their max stable overclocks, and then sell the
| good ones at markup (and the not-so-great ones at a little
| below market). If you wanted the very fastest cpu money could
| buy, and didn't want to start binning cpus yourself, they were
| the best option.
|
| The market has largely died out because the manufacturers have
| improved their binning and reduced variability to the point
| that the best chips are no longer meaningfully better than the
| average and OC rarely makes much sense anyway. In many ways,
| this is good for customers, but it is an end of an era.
| awesomeusername wrote:
| RIP. It was a great service and really well run.
| avree wrote:
| Who?
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