What is The 'Silicon Lottery'?

The manufacturing and testing is completely automated these days. Brief review of the process after etching, etc, which was covered in that video:

  • Wafer test: a large supercomputer connects to each processor die while still on the wafer and runs each one through built-in-self-tests (BIST) to test both logic, memory, and communications abilities
  • Dicing & packaging: The wafer is sliced into individual dies, and the ones which are good are placed onto a small PCB, and optionally, have a heat spreader glued on top
  • Module Test: Each packaged module is tested again using the same supercomputer testers with more complex tests, typically lasting a few seconds to minutes per part for simple devices, 30 mins to a couple hours for enterprise quality chips. The data from both wafer test and module test determine binning.
  • Validation, Verification, Characterization, etc: A subset of these chips will be sent to labs and sent through extensive testing to verify the chip's design, find and fix design flaws, quantify expected performance change over the life of the processor, etc. This data also feeds back into line centering, where they'll have manufacturing tinker with various settings trying to get the best, most reliable processor, and make decisions on which settings to use for mass production.
/r/videos Thread Parent Link - youtube.com