Why improve steppings?

It seems to me that steppings arent necessary at all and manufacturers are hurting themselves, i have 0 problems with this , by releasing these better processors. What i dont understand is why Amd and intel dont just make a processor family and dont revise it. Sure it wont be good for overclocking, but they dont really want you to be doing that, but it saves money on R&D and on changing the fab's. And its not like there is a performance difference between 2 steppings.

IT BOGGLES MY MIND

They have to improve them at one point cause they will hit a spot where they cant get any higher (stability wise) on that stepping(that comes really fast), it actually costs more money if they dont, because theyd basically be making 2,3,4,5, etc different chips at once and that costs alot of money.

Chipmakers must continually make slight revisions to their chip designs if they want to increase the top speeds of their chips. A particular chip design will only scale so high without changes. Since they want to be able to track these changes and give OEMs a heads-up on revisions, they create steppings.

Steppings aren't just for performance gains either. They can be for power reduction, yield improvements, and even the addition of small features.

they need to improve because they need to release faster cpus. this way they can release faster cpu serveral times a year. inorder to cut costs they make lower end models on the same wafer as the faster ends.. this way amd or intel dont need like 10 diff fab plants for each of their cpus that they have.. in the end its good for us and good for them.

Increased performance is not typcially the driving force in new steppings. They are usually just a side benefit. More advanced fabrication technologies are rolled out as soon as feasible because they increase yield, thereby reducing the production cost of the individual cpus. Other than implementing more efficient production techniques and technologies steppings are occasionally forced by the need to correct an error in the current design. But as always with mass production, it is economy of production that motivates change more often than not.

Seeing as improved fabrication technology also allows for a (marketable) speed increase at the same time it cuts the cost of production, manufacturers have no reason not to progress to a more advanced stepping as soon as possible, but of the two aspects the production cost constraints are the dominant factor in most cases.

So far everyone is right. But I feel speed increase is the main reason. When AMD and Intel make chips, they all come off the same line. Thus when a 3.0 Ghz chip needs a certain stepping, the production line makes everychip with that stepping. Then the slower chips are tested and weeded out. Its the cheapest most efficient way they can do it. Thats why the slow speed chips can overclock as high as their big brothers. They are just a "bad" model of that stepping.


I'm not sure if steppings have anything to do with fabrication technology. Steppings are designed to improve the efficiency of the chip and add new features. I'm sure there is a relationship between the two, but then if fabrication was totally related to steppings we wouldn't care about what week the CPU was made in.

A fab can be actively making chips of more than one stepping -- or more than one product for that matter. Usually chipmakers are producing chips of several steppings at a time in order to smooth the transition from one step to another, meet customer committments, and deal with problems with a particular stepping more effectively.

A stepping generally just involves the design of the chip. As such, it's easy to switch from one stepping in the fab to another by switching masks (the "negatives" used to print layers of each chip onto the silicon during lithography). But sometimes a process is tweaked along with a specific stepping, so in those cases that stepping can only be run on certain lines in the fab.

madcow235 said:

It seems to me that steppings arent necessary at all and manufacturers are hurting themselves, i have 0 problems with this , by releasing these better processors. What i dont understand is why Amd and intel dont just make a processor family and dont revise it. Sure it wont be good for overclocking, but they dont really want you to be doing that, but it saves money on R&D and on changing the fab's. And its not like there is a performance difference between 2 steppings.

IT BOGGLES MY MIND

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Steppings and such could also be used in a RECALL... say that they just find out something was wrong with all juihb's and needed to be recalled?

cack01 said:

So far everyone is right. But I feel speed increase is the main reason. When AMD and Intel make chips, they all come off the same line. Thus when a 3.0 Ghz chip needs a certain stepping, the production line makes everychip with that stepping. Then the slower chips are tested and weeded out. Its the cheapest most efficient way they can do it. Thats why the slow speed chips can overclock as high as their big brothers. They are just a "bad" model of that stepping.

Click to expand...

well, only later in the game when even the "bad" cpu's are good. early in a processors life... bad chips really is just that. unoverclockable junk. xp tbreds been out for a while