Intel and AMD sell chips with some bad cache or faulty cores. What they do is disable the faulty components and sell it a lesser specced CPU. When manufacturing

Intel and AMD sell chips with some bad cache or faulty cores. What they do is disable the faulty components and sell it a lesser specced CPU. When manufacturing ramps up and kinks are worked out they might have to disable working parts to be produce those lesser specced (and cheaper) CPUs. All they're doing now is including a switch that customers can pay to flip, enabling those disabled components. The only difference after this announcement is that people who may not have known about this practice now know about it, and Intel is giving people a "switch" to turn these parts on.