Now, How much of that is true I don't know but that's what I remember reading at the time. A friend of mine did succesfully unlock his triple and ran for a long time.
Now, How much of that is true I don't know but that's what I remember reading at the time. A friend of mine did succesfully unlock his triple and ran for a long time.
It's called "binning", and it's not just for defects. CPUs from the same chain can have different tolerances, one will reach 3.5GHz easy and the next one won't be stable beyond 2.8. Those are also put in different bins and sold as different models.
> Now, How much of that is true I don't know but that's what I remember reading at the time.
It's completely correct. Selling a model from the exact corresponding bin is ideal, but if you have more demand than the bin provides you get parts from higher bins and gate them. A few years ago that got very very common with Intel parts as they reached tremendously low defect rates, and more or less any CPU you bought would come from the highest bins gated and undermultiplied to whichever model you'd buy.
Floorsweeps are done when a part of a chip isn't passing tests. The defective part gets fused off and the chip gets sold as a dual core instead of a quad core, for example.
Binning is orthogonal. It's a qualitative measurement of (the part of) a chip that passes all tests. The electrical and thermal properties of a chip are tested, e.g. the leakage current and temperature are measured at different clock speeds and voltages (this is infinitely more complex for a battery powered device where voltages and currents fluctuate). The ones that pass with best results are sold as a premium product and the rest are clocked down and sold for less.
So a "K" model Intel chip comes from the best bin. An i3 chip dual core is a floorswept quad core i5. (This is what I assume, I don't work for Intel and don't know the details)
But these chips may not sell in the proportion they get manufactured in, which means that some perfectly functional quad cores get fused to dual cores and sold for cheaper. If you're lucky, you're getting one of these (and un-fusing, if possible, will work).
Floorsweeping and binning are required because the tolerances of modern semiconductor manufacturing are so tight. To get the best bin to perform well, the manufacturing process is really pushed to the extreme, which means that there will be chips that have manufacturing defects as well as lower performing chips.
The "stand alone" math co-processor you could add to an SX based system to gain h/w floating point was actually a full blown 486 dx CPU with a different pin layout (one extra pin) so it couldn't be used as CPU and could therefore be priced differently.
I can build a large project in NetBeans as fast on this system as on a hex-core FX-6100 (and I can watch my CPU monitor clearly showing all four cores running during the build).
CPU temperatures stay well within limits with the stock cooler.