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Hidden Cores On Phenom CPUs Can Be Unlocked
An anonymous reader writes "One of the major ways a semiconductor manufacturer manages to make the most of its chips is through binning. Chips able to cope with high clock speeds with all cores running end up as premium product lines, while others end up as models rated at lower speed grades, or with fewer cores. In the case of AMD's Phenom CPUs, dual and triple core models are quad cores with some disabled, while some newer quad core CPUs are actually six core models with two disabled. To this end both ASUS and MSI have announced that they have modified versions of AMD 890FX- and 890GX-based motherboards to unlock these hidden cores. Much like overclocking, there is no guarantee that you will gain anything by unlocking the hidden cores — everything depends on just why your CPU ended up in a certain product line."
These cores are probably disabled for yield reasons: the disabled core probably did not pass all the tests. [1]
I don't know about you, but I would not want to be willingly running a system with a known-bad CPU core, when for a few dollars more, you could simply buy the 4 core version.
[1] It would be highly unlikely to just disable a valid core, because if they were doing a fair amount of that, it would be better to make a new mask set that was JUST a 2 or 3 core processor.
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If processor manufacturers used different manufacturing lines for each version of a CPU that is actually sold, the prices would be ten times higher. What actually happens is each chip is tested, and depending what quality class it ends up falling into, parts of the chip that aren't up to snuff are disabled.
Wow, those assholes, trying to make it as cheap as possible to manufacture CPUs while still providing low-end, low-cost versions to those of us who can't afford to subsidize the $3 billion they spent on the plant to make the damn things.