All the Next Gen Nintendo SoC likely possibilities published by NVidia

[Pemalite]

Doctor_MG said:

Pemalite said:

nVidia scales these chips upwards and downwards depending on market or segment. Doesn't mean it's customized, just binned differently. (Or die harvested.)

The fact that this is the only chip that contains 8-cores on a single cluster suggests it's not simply product binning. 

Every chip in existence... Be it Ram, NAND, GPU, CPU or APU is binned.
Binning doesn't mean just deactivating parts of a chip, it can mean a change in voltages and clockrates.

Binning a Tegra chip may mean that you retain all the CPU cores, but loose GPU cores or disable a chunk of the memory controller... This is a balance Nintendo is going to have to chalk up... Because to much CPU grunt will take away from the graphics quality.

Conina said:

They could deactivate 1 core and only use 7.

Didn't Sony had 1 core deactivated in the PS3? Apple also had 7 cores for the first M1 Macbook Air and 8 for the later models 

The Cell had 1 PPE and 6 SPE's.
The 7th SPE was dedicated to the OS/Security... And an 8th SPE was disabled in order to increase yields.