Originally posted by: Idontcare
Originally posted by: Denithor
Originally posted by: SunnyD
Originally posted by: Borealis7
so those "s" quads that produce less heat also have lower performance? because you cant just "reduce heat" it has to come at a proce...
It's possible they're the same clock, just voltage binned instead.
Exactly, they just cherry-pick the CPUs that will run stable at lower voltage (and therefore produce less heat during operation) and sell them with a higher margin.
If you buy a "normal" Q9xx0 it might undervolt to the same level but there's no guarantee (just like with overclocking - no guarantee of hitting a certain speed).
In this situation the phrase
cherry-picking is probably extended beyond its usual implications in a manner in which it shouldn't.
This is simple binning, the same binning that goes into deciding if a chip will be sold as a Q9400 or a Q9550.
They've just created an additional bin to separate the high(er) VID chips from the low(er) VID chips that are binned for any given clockspeed tier. The consumer level impact of this is that we probably can kiss low(er) VID Q9550's good-bye as they will all be skimmed out of the distribution and labeled Q9550s, etc.
This is not to be confused with an alternative approach to using a new stepping for special low-power penryns which have had speedpaths tweaked (e.g. higher latency L1 or L2, etc) to enable continued IC functionality at lower VID. TMK these "s" parts we are discussing are not special stepping, just additional binning.
Cherry-picking implies the chips are given a higher level of personal (i.e. human) scrutiny post Q9550 binning (for example) and are hand-selected for further bin designation as lower-power chips. Francois's i7 975 for example is a cherry-picked CPU. I doubt these new "s" penryn chips are cherry-picked in any sense of the phrase.