AMD's triple core processors were quads with disabled cores. Often times processors within a line are processors with manually set lower clock multipliers or disabled cache.
Sounds like Intel has just made it unlockable instead of permanent. It just brings to the fore what was already being done, and makes us question again the ethics of pricing models.
This is generally the result of segregating defective parts of the chip in order to create a stable (albeit less powerful) chip.
Some of the chips will be fully capable of running with all parts enabled, but in a higher power envelope (this is a guess - but I believe that the fully capable chips most likely to be sacrificed are those that have trouble fitting in the ideal power envelope).
I would also imagine that (under some circumstances) chips that are fully functional within the expected power envelope will be artificially limited in order to control levels of stock.
The vast majority of chips that are limited in this way will be out of spec, unstable or inoperable when unlocked.
> AMD's triple core processors were quads with disabled cores.
That's binning & price discrimination, Intel did the same (with quads v dual IIRC): if you have a defective core, you gate it and sell a 2/3 core instead of a quad. Of course the issue is when the low bin becomes too popular and you have to start low-binning "perfect" parts to keep supplies acceptable (used to be very common for Intel starting ~mid-cycles, they'd literally run out of defects, which is why their low-end CPUs had such good performances & were ridiculously overclockable)
Nvidia‘s GeForce cards could be converted to Quadro cards by opening a chip and adding some lines with a pencil. Don’t think that this still works, but a colleague of my father did it for his home PC.
However, that (and the later software modification) could both hamper performance in games and could exhibit correctness problems in accuracy-focused use cases, so it was rarely a great idea.
No, that was just spoofing the PCI VID:PID to the kernel. It did not enable hardware features, just fooled the driver into thinking it was another device. You could do the same with a patched kernel if you don't want to solder.
Which is another way of saying you had those lanes, and Intel wanted more money before letting you use what you’d already bought.