Product binning is the categorizing of finished products based on their characteristics. Any mining, harvesting, or manufacturing process will yield products spanning a range of quality and desirability in the marketplace. Binning allows differing quality products to be priced appropriately for various uses and markets.

Economic and legal theory

Product binning and grading allows a degree of

price discrimination Price discrimination is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider in different markets. Price discrimination is distinguished from product different ...

which may be easier to defend legally, since it can be based on real or perceived differences in product quality. In order to undergo binning, manufactured products require testing, usually performed by machines in bulk. Binning allows large variances in performance to be condensed into a smaller number of marketed designations. This ensures coherency in the marketplace, with tiers of performance clearly delineated. The immediate result of this practice is that, for legal and reputational reasons, products sold under a certain designation must meet that designation at a ''minimum''. Individual products may still exceed advertised performance. Different bins may even be assigned different model numbers and prices .

Agriculture

An everyday example of product binning occurs with agricultural products, such as fruits, nuts, and vegetables. The yield from a harvest may vary considerably in quality, from near-inedible to ideal photographic appearance. The produce is sorted into quality categories which may be based on nutrition and safety, but also often have criteria that are based on cosmetic appearance. The best quality items may be classified into categories such as "Choice" or "Grade A", and are sold at a premium price for table presentation and consumption. Items that are less visually appealing or damaged may be binned for incorporation into frozen, dried, canned, or otherwise-processed foods. Consumers rarely see these lesser categories for sale in a raw, unprocessed condition. Foods of even lower quality may be processed into

pet food Pet food is animal feed intended for consumption by pets. Typically sold in pet stores and supermarkets, it is usually specific to the type of animal, such as dog food or cat food. Most meat used for animals is a byproduct of the human food indu ...

animal feed Animal feed is food given to domestic animals, especially livestock, in the course of animal husbandry. There are two basic types: fodder and forage. Used alone, the word ''feed'' more often refers to fodder. Animal feed is an important input to ...

, or composted into fertilizer.

Clothing and fashion

Gemstones

Semiconductor manufacturing

Background

Semiconductor manufacturing is an imprecise process, sometimes achieving as low as 30% yield. Defects in manufacturing are not always fatal, and in many cases it is possible to salvage part of a failed batch of

integrated circuits An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

by modifying performance characteristics. For example, by reducing the

clock frequency In computing, the clock rate or clock speed typically refers to the frequency at which the clock generator of a processor can generate pulses, which are used to synchronize the operations of its components, and is used as an indicator of the pr ...

or disabling non-critical parts that are defective, the parts can be sold at a lower price, fulfilling the needs of lower-end market segments. This practice occurs throughout the semiconductor industry on products such as CPUs,

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

, and

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

s, SSDs. In 2020, when Apple launched their new

Apple silicon Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture. It is the basis of most new Mac computers as well as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, a ...

M1 chip, they offered parts with 8 GPU cores as well as 7 GPU cores, a result of binning parts that had shortcomings. In 2021, when Apple launched their new Apple silicon A15 Bionic chip, they similarly gave a 5-core GPU to the iPhone 13 Pro and iPad mini 6 and a (binned) 4-core GPU to the iPhone 13.

Speed bump

A speed bump, in computer terms, is a slight increase in frequency (e.g., from 1.8 to 1.9

GHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...

) or a slight increase in functionality (e.g.

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

Core Core or cores may refer to: Science and technology * Core (anatomy), everything except the appendages * Core (manufacturing), used in casting and molding * Core (optical fiber), the signal-carrying portion of an optical fiber * Core, the centra ...

i7-8700K to i7-8086K). Some time after the initial release of a product, manufacturers may choose to increase the

of an

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

for a variety of reasons, ranging from improved yields to more conservative speed ratings (e.g., actual power consumption lower than TDP). These models are binned as different product chipsets, which places the product into separate virtual bins in which manufacturers can designate them into lower-end chipsets with different performance characteristics.

Testing

Finished products enter a machine that can test hundreds of pieces at a time, taking only a few hours to complete. Each piece can be tested to determine its highest stable

and accompanying

voltage Voltage, also known as electric pressure, electric tension, or (electric) potential difference, is the difference in electric potential between two points. In a static electric field, it corresponds to the work needed per unit of charge to m ...

and

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied o ...

while running.

Overclocking and core unlocking

Overclocking

Overclocking In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated spe ...

is the increase of clock speed beyond the manufacturer's maximum rated clockspeed. Since manufacturers are only required to meet the minimum advertised specifications, the potential for overclocking of a product is not typically tested during the binning process. Therefore, it should not be assumed that higher-rated products will overclock better than lower-rated ones. The resulting variation in upper-limit overclocking potential between otherwise identical pieces of hardware results in what is known as the "silicon lottery" by computer hobbyists, where the peak stable clock speeds (typically of a CPU or GPU) are unknown until being tested after purchasing.

Core unlocking

Similar to frequency binning, products may also be binned based upon the number of cores which are enabled. As with overclocking, some chips may have more cores than marketed. It may be possible for the end user to enable these cores.

References

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External links

Philips Lumileds LUXEON Application Brief
an example of a documented binning structure Semiconductor device fabrication Production and manufacturing