It's what made the rounds in dev circles where I worked. The technician would have still to upgrade/re-install the OS, and to prevent the perceived rip-off with

It's what made the rounds in dev circles where I worked. The technician would have still to upgrade/re-install the OS, and to prevent the perceived rip-off with the knipper to be noticed and make the customer feel bad, I think they also discussed that the technician should do some theater job such as walking in with a packaged CPU upgrade kit so that the upgrade took at least 2 hours. It was not a rip-off, as the 5000 had, like all CPUs, a costly upfront development investment. Idk but the reason why some ND-500 -> 5000 upgrades may have come with real silicon while others only need the knippers job is maybe that once the 5000 CPU was produced in quantities, the 500 that were still sold were equipped with 5000 CPUs from that point on, to save an expensive CMOS production line. Even IBM, by around 1990 at the latest, produced all their non-X86 CPUs (for P-Series aka RS/6000, I-Series aka AS/400, and Z-Series aka S/390) off the same silicon.