binning

Binning is the method of separating electronic devices into tiers by their quality. It’s a very important step in determining the performance of a product, and ultimately its value.

In the context of PC hardware, binning is commonly used when talking about CPUs and GPUs. Higher quality chips are “binned” higher and would often be placed in more expensive product categories. For example, an highly binned Intel quad-core chip would be marked as an i7, where as lesser binned chips would have features disabled and be labelled as an i5 or below.