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

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... :)