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unixhero

The duron had a pencil trick which unlocked it somehow. I don't remember the details.

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The pencil trick:

"Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using [a] Pencil

Hold your CPU in your left hand and look very closely at the CPU, so as to clearly see the L1 bridges.

Use a business card to separate the bridges so that you do not connect the L1 bridges to each other. Work your way across the bridges from left to right (using a business card as a separation tool) and connect the bridges by rubbing the pencil back and forth over the bridges about twenty times until it is dark black, not the normal gold color. Make sure that all the bridges are reconnected, but not touching each other, and you are on your way.

I know it sounds incredible, but that is actually all there is to it. Your processor, if done correctly, is ready to be overclocked. It can now be set to run at different clock frequencies, eliminating the need to increase the FSB."

http://computer-communication.blogspot.com/2007/06/unlocking...

I had never heard of this trick. I love it though. Reminds me of using a hole punch to make a double sided floppy disk from a cheaper priced single sided floppy.[0]

Of course there was the AMD multi-core CPUs that had some of the cores disabled via software and sold at cheaper prices. Of course there were software hacks available to re-enable those cores.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-sided_disk

Oh, yes, the Phenom II 550 Black Edition. The early ones like the one I still have stashed away were an unsung bargain. My motherboard has a BIOS option to unlock extra cores, and so I got four cores for the price of two; at the stock clock speed all cores were rock-solid stable. I never did find any unbuffered 4GB ECC RAM sticks, so I had to settle for 4x1GB.

With 16 GB and a SATA3 controller or PCIE-to-NVMe adapter it would still be a respectable performer today, in spite of the DDR2.

Wow! Old man and the puncher ... those were the days.

Some would just have been faulty units : tried to turn my tri-core into a 4-core, but it didn't work...

I used this trick, and it did indeed work as intended. It was a little scary ("You want me to draw on my CPU?!?"), though.

The Duron had a set of circuit traces exposed on the ceramic chip carrier that were cut by laser at the factory to set the maximum allowed clock multiplier (and thus its final speed). You could reconnect all the cut traces with pencil lines and use a motherboard that let you set the multiplier directly to overclock freely.

it was cheaper for AMD to produce one chip and then selectively cut the multiplier lines to differentiate sku for different market segments, so if you closed the lines again you'd get a different, faster clock multiplier

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