Examples described herein provide for determining a recipe for identifying from which buckets integrated circuit chips are taken to form units of a multi-chip apparatus. In an example, a method uses a processor-based system and uses a Markov Decision Process. Buckets are defined based on respective characteristics of manufactured chips. Each of the manufactured chips is binned into a respective one of the buckets based on the characteristic of the respective manufactured chip. A recipe for identifying from which of the buckets to take one or more of the manufactured chips to incorporate into respective ones of the units of the multi-chip apparatus is generated.