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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

You rarely see those kinds of unlocks anymore unfortunately, since they started using eFuses to disable parts of the chip permanently. It still happens occasionally though, like the time when AMD decided to add a 4GB SKU alongside the originally planned 8GB SKU of one of their graphics cards so late in development that they didn't have time to actually change the hardware, so all of the initial batches had 8GB installed with half of it disabled in the VBIOS where applicable, which was easy to reverse by flashing the VBIOS from the 8GB version.

The one time in history when "download more RAM" wasn't just a meme.

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Honorable mention of ATI Radeon 9600 that was soft-upgradeable (via hacked drivers) to 9800 PRO for a 200% perf boost. Good times.

And NVidia GeForce 6600GS to 6800GT with pencil mod and flash.

Actually it was the Ati Radeon 9500 non pro that could be modded into a Radeon 9700. Regarding the ATI Radeon 9600, there was a variant called Radeon 9550 that could be overclocked from 250 mhz to 400 mhz.

And my personal favorite, the Radeon 9100 which was actually a Radeon 8500 in PCI format instead of AGP. With a slightly tweaked 8500 Mac Edition bios you would have a very fast GPU for first gen PCI Macs through the Yikes G4. I believe some faster NVidia PCI cards ended up appearing and being made to run on Macs but I had moved from my XPostfacto PCI Macs to an Intel mini by then.

> Actually it was the Ati Radeon 9500 non pro that could be modded into a Radeon 9700.

Sometimes. At least some of those 9500s were binned parts that showed their broken bits when you modded them. I had one. The screen turned into a kaleidoscope when I tried to play a game.

Was definitely worth a try if you had one though!

Wow, that’s even better than my old PNY GTX 465. It was really a 470 that was cut down by the VBIOS. I was able to download 256MB of VRAM, a wider memory bus and some GPU cores on that one.

IBM servers this was the default as well. Where the difference between ram amounts on AS400 systems was a phone call to enable more.

Having dormant hardware which is intended to be unlockable later is a separate thing, which is rarely seen on consumer hardware. Intel tried it a while ago but the backlash was so severe that they gave up and reverted to permanently fusing off the silicon.

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

I believe they still have something similar which allows Xeon processors to be upgraded in the field though. Car manufacturers have been testing the waters too, e.g. installing heated seats in every model and making them a paid software unlock for lower end models that didn't have that option enabled from the factory.

IBM’s problem was going to be inventory, labor, scheduling, and transportation costs.

Your mainframe is slow and IBM is going to charge you 6 hours of labor to come out for 90 minutes next Friday, or we can deal with it over the phone.

I can’t recall but did IBM use that extra hardware for physical redundancy in case of hardware failures? I know they researched letting equipment die and coming out and replacing it after multiple failures instead of single ones, but I don’t know if they applied that to shipping mainframes, to regular rackmount hardware, or just in Research.

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