The short version
- Binning means sorting chips after they're made, based on how well each one turned out.
- The best chips go into expensive products. Ones with small flaws get parts switched off and sold as cheaper models.
- Nvidia's RTX 5090 and its RTX Pro 6000 workstation card both use the same GB202 chip.
- When chips are in short supply, the company can send more of them to the pricier product. That's what the latest RTX 5090 reports suggest.
Why chips aren't all the same
A processor is printed onto a silicon wafer, with dozens of chips on each one. It is extremely precise work, but it's never perfect. A speck of dust or a tiny defect can break part of a chip. Some chips also run happily at higher speeds than others, even from the same wafer.
So manufacturers test every chip and sort it into "bins". It's the same idea as grading fruit.
Switching parts off
Modern graphics chips are made of many repeated blocks of cores. If one block is faulty, the maker can disable it and sell the chip with fewer cores enabled, instead of binning the whole thing in the other sense.
That's how GB202 works. The full chip has 24,576 CUDA cores. The RTX Pro 6000 enables 24,064 of them and pairs them with 96GB of memory. The RTX 5090 gets 21,760 cores and 32GB. A chip that isn't quite good enough for the Pro card can still make a perfectly good 5090.
The same thing happens with CPUs. A Core i5 is often a Core i7 design with some cores turned off.
Why it matters for gamers
Binning is mostly good news, since it keeps prices lower than they'd be if every flawed chip were thrown away. The catch is that gaming and professional cards are competing for the same supply.
A workstation card can sell for several times the price of an RTX 5090, which already lists from about ₹2.7 lakh in India. If GB202 chips run short, it makes business sense to send them to the Pro line. That's what leakers claim is happening now, as we covered in our RTX 5090 production report.
On paper, a 5090 is a slightly trimmed Pro card. In practice, it's the one more likely to go missing from shelves.
Images: NVIDIA.
