Quote:
Originally Posted by hans007
i work in the computer industry. the core i3/i5/i7 are all basically the same piece of silicon. they sell all of them at different price points, price points just far enough apart to maybe tempt just the right amount of buyers into the right buckets.
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As do I, but it's not quite the same piece of silicon. They bin the chips after slicing the wafer to determine what works on each die and what doesn't - no wafer has 100% functional chips. They disable broken cores, dead execution units, broken sectors of L2/L3 cache, and (these days) even on die GPU's - and sell them not as defective products, but as lower performing and lower priced units. The chips that pass completely go on to be the top tier, or even xeon units, and the rest become desktop processors in the marketing brands you stated. It's a way to sell "broken" chips and still make a profit.
Similar, but different.
In BMW's case, they are making multiple models that all have to work (Can't sell one with a broken transmission), and they get the economy of scale by sharing some part commonality between them (engines, transmissions, differentials, some suspension components, i-drive units, etc). I'm sure they make better margins off of their top tier lines like the 6 and 7 series, but clearly not everyone can afford them or even WANTS them. It's frustrating to see this artificial performance handicapping of smaller models "so as not to harm their higher margin products" when a large market sector wasn't intending on purchasing one of their higher margin cars to begin with.
It would make sense to make all of them the best that they can be, and not intentionally hold a model back. If a car goes 'viral' so to speak, all the better - they still are making profit, and buyers are getting what they really wanted in the first place, increasing purchaser satisfaction.
This is the piece of marketing that I understand, but can't stand.
All in all, I'm happy to see the N55B30T0 being used instead of the S55 - it should have similar power output, reliability,
but at reduced cost and the expense of the ability to really push the guts of the motor with aggressive tuning. I'm not happy to see i-drive forced down my throat, but it's arguably more expensive to provide the OPTION and design/install/support two infotainment systems and dash types than to just make everyone pay for i-drive and be done with it.
I still hope the "T0" means it gets two turbos.
.... and the electric power steering doesn't suck.