Does Apple or Qualcomm do product binning for their SoCs?

Question

It's well known that Intel does product binning with their CPUs — essentially selling the same chip as multiple different chips with different specs and prices based on the tested properties of the chip.

My understanding is that this has to do with the fact that there's a lot of variation in the cutting edge IC manufacturing.

So how does a company like Apple deal with it? They don't have 10 different products with same generation CPU but different specs. They have just one, say, A10 chip that's in at most two-three different products (often just one), and they all have to work.

So how does it work? Do they purposefully build chips that are driven lower than they could perform to smooth out the variation? Do different iPhones have differently-performing CPUs? Does the same version of the chip put in iPhone/iPad/iPhone Plus actually have different specs (therefore allowing for some binning)?

Answer 1

Do they purposefully build chips that are driven lower than they could

Yes and no. I can't speak for these specific examples brands, but in a sense all chips are designed that way. They are designed with variability in mind, designed such that all chips meet specifications. Circuit techniques are used to compensate for variability (and some other tricks, like playing with voltages).

In addition, there are cases where redundant bits are used. For example, the CELL CPU in the Playstation 3 console was manufactured with 8 SPE units, however one was disabled during testing. This way, they could "afford" to have one core not work and still have a working chip. Note that this is the case on every CPU - even if all 8 SPEs are working.

Similar things are sometimes done on lower levels, and a full discussion would take too much time to write and be outside of the scope of the question. But binning is not the only possible technique that can be used to improve yields, and only a very select number of applications actually support it. For example, if your chip has any part that has to meet a standard, say the WiFi specifications, it either meets it or fails to meet it. Nobody will be interested in a "slightly less specification meeting" version.