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Comment by Joker_vD | Hacker News Reader

I think I actually saw a question on SO way back during the Windows Vista era when some guy asked if Windows supported machines with odd number of cores/processors, and the answer was "well, 1 is an odd number, you know".

Another joke from the same era: Having a 2 core processor means that you can now e.g. watch a film at the same time. At the same time with what? At the same time with running Windows Vista!

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Sure, but 1 is also a power of 2:

2^0 = 1

So the logic might make sense in people's heads if they never encounter 6 or 12 core CPUs that are common these days.

Even long ago we had the AMD Phenom X3 chips which were 3 cores.

The fun thing about those is they were physically quad cores with one core disabled, which may or may not have been defective, so if you were lucky you could unlock it and get a bonus core for free.

Binning made the world weird.

Made it so sweet too. Buying a product that could become so much more (more frequency, more cores, more cache) at no extra cost was magical.

Got a 4 core machine that way dirt cheap. Bought (a phenom II BE I think) 2 core cpu which unlocked into a quad core.

Unlocking downgraded tech is one of the purest joys.

Unlocked a 6800gs video card back in the 8x agp days. Freaking sweet for a 16yo!

Xbox 360 (which ran a modified version of Win 2000) had 3 PowerPC cores.

The ps3 had 7. Also for yield reasons.

Well, the PS3 had 1 PowerPC core, the PPE, with 8 SPEs. One of which gets disabled for yield, another gets taken by the Hypervisor.

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