4 ms·

Your comment somehow reminds me how about 20 years ago me with my friend tried to came up with a stupidest possible conspiracy theory ever, and what we settled

Your comment somehow reminds me how about 20 years ago me with my friend tried to came up with a stupidest possible conspiracy theory ever, and what we settled on was an idea that all possible hardware features are already implemented, and when you install a new CPU for example, it's actually just a heating element and a collection of jumpers to tell motherboard to adjust a performance of the real CPU hidden in it accordingly.

maushu 6y ago
Funnily enough that seems very similar to "cpu binning" in which sections of a cpu are disabled based on stress testing so you end up with different models but the same underlaying hardware. So of course a pointy-haired boss found out about it and you end up with stupid stuff like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service
LoSboccacc 6y ago
this wasn't that far off. for a while you could upgrade celeron to pentium soldering a connection, the r5 are r7 with cores disabled, the athlon II did the same but was easier to unlock as the extra core are turned off not from yeld but to follow market demand.
- ktta 6y ago
  Or unlock a processor to be able to overclock it by using a pencil https://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=3671 https://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=3671
  - sevensor 6y ago
    I unlocked an Athlon in 2000 using pencil graphite and used it to heat my apartment all winter long.
pantelisk 6y ago
Well, your conspiracy was somewhat true for AMD PHENOM X2 550, a 2-core cpu which was the same as the 4-core model, but had 2 cores deactivated. Users were able to unlock the cores with BIOS tricks (and some future mobos would do it automatically though it depended on the quality of the chip. AMD even played along and released an optimized for overclocking version (since users had to bump voltage to unlock the cores in the first place)). But also the user you are quoting, the "gamedev trick" is actually somewhat of a true story as well. But it wasn't an optimization trick. It was just different teams that each acted as if they are working on the most important thing, competing for limited old-hardware resources! Some coders, pre-version control, would just pre-allocate ram even if they didn't really need it, just so they don't have to go through the dance of asking other teams to release some. As you can imagine, when the project ended up going beyond the hardware limits causing chaos and stress to the devs, those people would descend as heroes and say "Here I was able to free 512kb!" (from their unnecessary preallocation calls) Ah, to be old on the internet... :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I've heard the same conspiracy theory doing the rounds, that CPUs can in fact be much faster already than they really are (like, generations ahead), but because They want to make money they're intentionally slowing things down with incremental releases. Joke's on them, software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

maushu 6y ago

Funnily enough that seems very similar to "cpu binning" in which sections of a cpu are disabled based on stress testing so you end up with different models but the same underlaying hardware. So of course a pointy-haired boss found out about it and you end up with stupid stuff like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service

LoSboccacc 6y ago

this wasn't that far off. for a while you could upgrade celeron to pentium soldering a connection, the r5 are r7 with cores disabled, the athlon II did the same but was easier to unlock as the extra core are turned off not from yeld but to follow market demand.

ktta 6y ago
Or unlock a processor to be able to overclock it by using a pencil https://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=3671 https://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=3671
- sevensor 6y ago
  I unlocked an Athlon in 2000 using pencil graphite and used it to heat my apartment all winter long.

pantelisk 6y ago

Well, your conspiracy was somewhat true for AMD PHENOM X2 550, a 2-core cpu which was the same as the 4-core model, but had 2 cores deactivated. Users were able to unlock the cores with BIOS tricks (and some future mobos would do it automatically though it depended on the quality of the chip. AMD even played along and released an optimized for overclocking version (since users had to bump voltage to unlock the cores in the first place)). But also the user you are quoting, the "gamedev trick" is actually somewhat of a true story as well. But it wasn't an optimization trick. It was just different teams that each acted as if they are working on the most important thing, competing for limited old-hardware resources! Some coders, pre-version control, would just pre-allocate ram even if they didn't really need it, just so they don't have to go through the dance of asking other teams to release some. As you can imagine, when the project ended up going beyond the hardware limits causing chaos and stress to the devs, those people would descend as heroes and say "Here I was able to free 512kb!" (from their unnecessary preallocation calls) Ah, to be old on the internet... :)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I've heard the same conspiracy theory doing the rounds, that CPUs can in fact be much faster already than they really are (like, generations ahead), but because They want to make money they're intentionally slowing things down with incremental releases. Joke's on them, software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]