5450LE card? Why not?

[VirtualLarry]

Just wondering why we don't see cut-down "LE" editions of the lower-end cards. After all, they make the larger dice for the high-end cards, and they get binned because of defects, etc., to make cut-down versions of cards with those.

Why don't we see that at the low end? Are the low-end dice cheap enough to just throw away? Or is there no easy way to fuse off, say, 40 of the 80 shaders in a 5450, and sell it as an "LE" version? (It would be slower than pig slop, but it would be useful for those people that simply need a display output, such as a third monitor.)

 

[Jimzz]

They are already small enough. That and the 5450 is dead. The 6450 is the lowwest end card from AMD now.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

They are already small enough. That and the 5450 is dead. The 6450 is the lowwest end card from AMD now.

Not really. Its just been rebranded as the 8350...

 

[Zodiark1593]

Just wondering why we don't see cut-down "LE" editions of the lower-end cards. After all, they make the larger dice for the high-end cards, and they get binned because of defects, etc., to make cut-down versions of cards with those.

Why don't we see that at the low end? Are the low-end dice cheap enough to just throw away? Or is there no easy way to fuse off, say, 40 of the 80 shaders in a 5450, and sell it as an "LE" version? (It would be slower than pig slop, but it would be useful for those people that simply need a display output, such as a third monitor.)

Since I can easily pick up DDR3 5450s for roughly $20-$25, I don't think there is a real need, at least, enough so for AMD to bother.

 

[ViRGE]

1) I don't think you can fuse off 40 SPs on a 5450. I believe 80 SPs is the minimum granularity for Evergreen.

2) As Jimzz notes, it's already small enough. The yields would be good (few parts to salvage) and the cost of the GPU as a portion of the whole is smaller here than it is on a high-end card. Assembly, testing, and shipping are a much larger fraction of the costs of the card by this point.

 

[Wall Street]

Because chip defects tend to be a certain number of defects square millimeter of silicon, and the lower end chips have much smaller die areas, the yields are much higher on the small chips meaning there are very few dies which would be candidate for harvesting by fusing off parts.

 

[jacktesterson]

I just bought a 6850 for $60 used off Kijiji (like Craig's List)

Built a cheap gaming rig with old parts. Got a good deal on a FX 4300/AsRock Extreme 3 combo too.





I think the used market solves this issue for most - considering 4350/5450's can be had for $20 used.

 

[Arkaign]

Probably most of the cost isn't variable in the card anyway. PCB, connectors, packaging, memory, etc. Beyond a point, there's only so much one can do to cut costs. Probable that the effort involved in making a new lower-end SKU would exceed the ROI.

 

[Zodiark1593]

Almost forgot, since the 5450 has only a single SIMD array of 80 stream processors, there isn't much of anything to fuse off anyway.