AMD and Intel have been doing this for longer than I've been buying computers. You go to your local computer shop and want to buy a 486. You have a choice betwe

AMD and Intel have been doing this for longer than I've been buying computers. You go to your local computer shop and want to buy a 486. You have a choice between buying a 486DX that is expensive and can perform floating point arithmetic quickly, and a 486SX is cheap and cannot. The 486DX and 486SX are the exact same hardware, but the SX has the X87 FPU disabled. You might say well yeah, but that's just a computer, not a car, but in 1990 you could easily spend $20,000 on a home computer with all the bells and whistles, which would be in the ballpark of $40,000 in 2020 dollars. Intel, AMD, and NVidia still do this. If anything, they're better at it today than they were back then.