My understanding is they test all the CPUs and differentiate them by the test results - you might have four of eight cores sitting there unused that are fine mo

My understanding is they test all the CPUs and differentiate them by the test results - you might have four of eight cores sitting there unused that are fine most of the time but have some weird edge case, so they disable the four for QC purposes and sell it as a lower end processor. It's not quite the same as locking them down just to sell them as a lower end unit, they'd rather it worked perfectly and sell it at the higher end. Unless you're talking about Intel's "upgradeable" processors [1] which you could pay more to unlock performance (but that was unlocking more L1 cache, not cores AFAIK) [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/83896-intel-offering-cpu-upgrade-card https://www.extremetech.com/computing/83896-intel-offering-c...