They also disable ECC, virtualization, VFIO, and other features for consumer products. AMD and Nvidia regularly produce a single GPU chip that gets used in consumer and PRO cards, costing much more on pro cards, with the only difference being packaging and the software. In effect, pro users subsidize development for everyone else in order to avoid some friction, but IMO that's fine, because pro users (CAD, design) have the most to gain from such development.
Kinda. The manufacturing process will always produce defects in these chips. A run can produce 100 chips (let's say)- 10 of those are perfect. 100% functional, and are sold as the highest quality chip. the next 20 are 99.99% functional. These are binned into their respective segments based on how well they test. These are sold as lower end parts. Maybe a core doesn't work or it can't clock as high.
Maybe the other 70 have some major issue with the special components, so they are only 99% functional and therefor can't be used in the high end segment, but can be used in the consumer chips.
Not every chip is perfect, which is why there exists different product classes. For some chips, an i5 is just an i7 that didn't fully pass validation.
I understand how that works. My point was just that it's not always about binning, sometimes it's all market segmentation. Drawing both sides of a polygon in a single pass is a pro GPU driver feature that has nothing to do with defects or binning. I think if Intel has unexpectedly good yield with low defects, they may end up using silicon good enough to support hyperthreading in a CPU that lacks the feature. They disable silicon-viable features for consumer chips on the regular --it's just to guarantee users of those features pay for Xeons.
