What kind of stress testing do the vendors do?

[Gerard]

Just wondering since we all seem to live and die by prime95\orthos to tell us if our cpu is stable, what do amd and intel use to tell them if their chips are gonna run at the rated speeds and voltages.?

They must have some kind of proccess the chips have to go through, and id assume it would have to be a hell of a lot quicker and more effecient than bunging each chip in for an 8 hour prime95 session.

I know they do speed binning so chips get rebadged etc but what kind of procedure do the chips go through to tell them if they will run at the intended speed or they will have to be clocked downwards.

 

[mrthingyx]

At a complete guess, probably something very similar to Orthos/Prime, albeit for a much shorter period.

It's probably an application that runs every single major part of the processor to make sure it's doing its job. But I highly doubt they run it for 10hrs in blend mode - too expensive, too time-consuming.

And besides, anybody who uses Orthos/Prime alone as a stability test is very short-sighted.

 

[Amonlym]

id wager they have specific devices to test cores, that actually test on a circuit by circuit base. rather than a room full of pc's. if the wafer is dud its a huge waste to stick the chips on to a substrate only to find out you now have 200 wasted.

 

[Gashman]

yeah intel and AMD will have much better ways of testing there silicon than using orthos/prime, not sure what it would be mind, same question goes for NVIDIA/ATI as well

 

[Jokester]

There's no way they do a full function check on each chip, from what I can vaguely remember from university I think they optically check each core whilst it's still on the wafer for anomalies and then each core is tested individually during speedbinning with some form of stress test.

 

[helmutcheese]

Some PC builders like Dell/Mesh etc do a "SINK TEST", least they should.