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Remarked Celerons Sold As P4s
Lam1969 writes "Sumner Lemon reports that a Chinese company, Shenzhen Chuanghui Electronics Co., is remarking Celeron chips as Pentium 4s and supplying software to mask the chips' real pedigree from operating systems. From the article : 'The remarked processors Chuanghui sells are actually 1.7-GHz Celeron chips and are currently available for $78 each, including a motherboard, in quantities of 100 or more, said James Zhan, a company representative named online as a contact for potential buyers. By comparison, Intel sells the real thing for $401 in 1,000-unit quantities without a motherboard, according to the company's most recent price list.'"
They're offering the masking software because some unscrupulous OEM (the sort who sells people pre-built computers with $7 power supplies so they know they'll be back in the shop soon) will buy these rebranded Celerons and sell them to consumers as the real deal.
I'd imagine that they don't really worry about masking it on non-Windows OSes, since the proportion of users that buys a machine from a vendor like this and puts Linux or something on it is likely rather small. The people buying from this sort of vendor aren't techies, or even really mass market; techies would be buying parts individually (and hopefully from a reputable vendor) or, like the majority of consumers, buying from Dell or HP or whichever big OEM is offering the best deal at the time.
This is an annoying, amoral practice, but it's not really any different from scams in any other industry. The solution is, as always, to buy from people you know and trust and avoid Comps'R'Us, no matter how sweet the deal seems.
Schlock Mercenary
This may not be your answer, but most of the times, a part of the chip is disabled for a reason.
A lot of people think that manufacturers just enable/disable functionality and sell them as premium/standard offerings. This is a wrong thought.
Caches take a decent amount of silicon. Very often the silicon yeild is not good, in which case caches are not 100% reliable, which is why they are instead marked as disabled, and the chip sold at a lower rate.
Even if you manage to enable these caches, they may not work for you reliably.
This is why I always run Sandra (http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/) benchmarks on every system I build. I remember one time I bought a motherboard/CPU combo and when I ran Sandra it came out to be about 3 speed grades lower than I had paid for. I brought it back and the fellow at the store (who also built whitebox machines) wanted to know how I knew. Then of course he apologized profusely and gave me what I'd paid for in the first place.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.