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Comment by legodt | Hacker News Reader

You're the guy who knew more and filled in the blanks! I am super fascinated by this topic (and an outsider). Do you have any specific examples or situations that you know of this happening? The hypothetical you gave above was awesome and now I'm curious for more.

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AMD's Tricore vs Quadcore... something (I think Phentoms??) were definitely this. Some Tricores were able to turn into quad-cores with some firmware hacking.

The IBM-Cell in the PS3 was a different approach to the same problem. The Cell was specified as 7-SPUs and 1-CPU, but in actuality... the manufacturing process made 8-SPUs and 1-CPU.

IBM assumed that one of the SPUs would fail during manufacturing, so they only promised to deliver 7 of them per PS3.

You can literally see the 8 SPUs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Cell-Pro...

There's lots of ways to approach the problem. Manufacturing is an imperfect process: not everything is made identically. So the manufacturers have to figure out how to test for differences and... if necessary... sell the same "manufactured" chip in different bins.

Thanks for taking the time to go further on this and link that image, very cool stuff.

> AMD's Tricore vs Quadcore... something (I think Phentoms??)

Phenom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Phenom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenom_II

Not all the hardware of Cell on PS3 was available if you run the official Linux port. Which was later blatantly removed.

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