I really don't think the article's speculation there is helpful... it's really reaching.
As I said below the article in the comments:
> If I were to speculate, I would strongly guess that the actual reason is licensing. AMD knows that more people are going to want the 16 core CPUs in order to fit into certain brackets of software licensing, so AMD charges more for those to maximize profit and availability of the 16 core parts. For those customers, moving to a 24 core processor would probably mean paying significantly more for whatever software they're licensing.
This is the more compelling reason to me, and it matches with server processors that Intel and AMD have charged more for in the past.
"Even vs odd" affecting the difficulty of the binning process just sounds extremely arbitrary... definitely not likely to affect customer prices, given how many other products are in AMD's stack that don't show this same inverse pricing discrepancy.
That paragraph struck me as poorly thought out/written as well. I think finding chiplets that will run two cores at the higher 3.5ghz clock is the tricky part, not that it's harder to pick the 2 fastest cores than pick 3.
As I said below the article in the comments:
> If I were to speculate, I would strongly guess that the actual reason is licensing. AMD knows that more people are going to want the 16 core CPUs in order to fit into certain brackets of software licensing, so AMD charges more for those to maximize profit and availability of the 16 core parts. For those customers, moving to a 24 core processor would probably mean paying significantly more for whatever software they're licensing.
This is the more compelling reason to me, and it matches with server processors that Intel and AMD have charged more for in the past.
"Even vs odd" affecting the difficulty of the binning process just sounds extremely arbitrary... definitely not likely to affect customer prices, given how many other products are in AMD's stack that don't show this same inverse pricing discrepancy.