First of all, they do do this. The AMD "tri-core" chip was a quad core that failed QA. Then most slower chips are in fact from faster chips but also failed QA and have to be underclocked.
However, the real answer is that because if you get a bit flipped, while most things are recoverable, there's a good chunk at the hardware level that is unrecoverable. You've seen this with blue screens. Chips like that wouldn't sell. Bluescreens and panics aren't acceptable to people.
This is the correct answer right here. The process is called "chip binning." https://www.techspot.com/article/2039-chip-binning/
This was Intel's 13000 and 14000 i7/i9 lines
And in just a few years, for me with my on-chip gpu needs and AMDs huge improvements around the same time, shopping for a processor went from having to read about Intel and AMD and wonder who I should choose for my next small laptop to not even considering anything with an Intel chip set. Thankfully this is also when AMD also became a standard offering at many OEM laptop makers (10 years prior you maybe had a few laptops in the entire market with an AMD option).
Intel truly squandered so much market dominance--despite it being clear to a layman where markets and the world was going-- it's breathtaking. The fact they missed both mobile phone chip explosion and GPUs despite having been producers of both at some level is wild. The fact they managed, separately, to lose an enormous amount of trust and reputation points with their customers is a testament to why their only new investor is someone as stupid and corrupt as Trump.
I remember when Intel made Pentium CPU's that had a small math error in some very specific floating point calculations. They were so afraid to damage their reputation (which was still excellent at the time) that they offered every Pentium owner across the globe (including me) a free new Pentium CPU without the bug, shipped to us at their expense, and even sending out a courier to pick up the old CPU (again for free) a few weeks later when we had time to swap them. That was basically the opposite of what you're suggesting.
More recently didn't Intel fire some planet manager that was knowing shipping out CPUs with literal rust on vital components
The programming language? Yea, that's a fireable offence.
/S
I think you are rewriting history. They did this only when they got forced to by revolting customers
Well yes, obviously there was outside pressure involved. Intel tried to hide and downplay the problem at first, but as the negative attention grew they pivoted to replacing all chips quite fast (in a month or so). I may have oversimplified a bit, but rewriting history goes a bit far, don't you think?
They kinda do (look up binning - not exactly the same thing though, there is still QC there) but the problem with putting out unstable chips is that, unless all the other companies do the same thing, people will just start buying from the companies that make the chips/devices that function reliably. Nobody wants to use a computer that crashes all the time or is otherwise nonfunctional.
The only thing more frustrating to diagnose than a circuit that fails all the time is a circuit that fails some of the time. Trying to correct the issue becomes a lot harder if you don't have a way to reliably reproduce the problem.
With that in mind I think most of the time if a manufacturer cheaped out on making a less reliable component then the engineer designing whatever circuit it was going to be in would probably rather find a more reliable chip, create a different, more reliable alternative to the problem, and/or try to omit that feature entirely. And I think if the manufacturer started cheaping out on those chips after the fact then it would be a stain on their reputation as suppliers of no longer reliable parts.
For every few cents the manufacturer might save on lowering the quality of an existing part they're likely going to lose many more dollars on engineers no longer trusting that manufacturer to continue to provide parts they want to trust will be good when they're producing their second 10,000 unit batch for the same circuit, or when that engineer is 5 projects down the line and needs that chip again.
With that in mind I think most of the time if a manufacturer cheaped out on making a less reliable component then the engineer designing whatever circuit it was going to be in would probably rather find a more reliable chip, create a different, more reliable alternative to the problem, and/or try to omit that feature entirely.
This is pretty much binning in a nutshell.
Most of them are easily replaced. You won't notice a difference if it's an AMD, intel, seagate, kingston, etc that made your drive, ram, CPU.
Because they can be replaced very easily they can't enshittify it. The tech giants that enshittify has made themselves very hard to replace in one way or another.
I don't remember the details, but the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities from a few years ago also felt like they were cutting corners. Those were enabled by some fundamental architectural decisions, which really just didn't sound like a good idea to me, when I read up on them.
It's already common for chipmakers to disable cores entirely because of a single mistake. With 100 Billion+ transistors, even a doubling in error rate would 100fold the number of wasted dies.
Making the stencils is already expensive there's no real way to cheap out on it.
Two reasons (personal lore. No proof) why they arent doing it as much:
Isn't that Intel's MO?
You don't think they're doing that as I'm writing this??
So many people here don't really know what they're talking about. Chip companies can't cut corners on stability because of the amount of money that goes into everything around the chips is huge. If you think of a PC motherboard and you look at how many components are on that board now, imagine if one of the company's cheaped out on a chip and didn't bother testing it before sending it out and the only time they found out it was bad was when they finished making a board. The cost of finding, repairing and replacing those components far exceeds the pennies that they save by cheaping out.
The real answer is that their customers are a user of the chips and the cost of a bad part is massively more expensive than a tiny savings in manufacturing the chip.
The only place they cheap out on parts is in things that are standalone and dirt cheap such as an RFID chip. I've seen those get manufactured without test and only at the very end after they've been assembled to their antenna they then test and reject the ones that fail. They get away with it there only because the cost of the chip and antenna are so cheap.
Imagine Apple putting a sub-tier component in their phone and having to recall 10% of their phones because of it. It's unheard of. The people who buy the chips are usually companies that use them and they have a very low threshold for bad components. While it's true, some parts are binned for performance, they are never binned for quality.
Note - I've been involved in the test of semiconductors for the past 20+ years making load boards (package test) and probe cards (Wafer test) for many different IC manufacturers.
I would think even tiny decreases in stability would drastically increase the frequency of system crashes. Software is generally made expecting total consistency in computer instructions like, for example, integer arithmetic. Any interference with that would probably not be cost-effective on the part of the chip manufacturer.
They used to. Or rather, the industry used to. Most of those players have since folded, largely because of them becoming known for crap quality.
Make games. Tabletop and video games.
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