Not that I am too familiar with the matter, but maybe the cores are not "real" independent cores, but share so much of the surrounding die that you have to make

Not that I am too familiar with the matter, but maybe the cores are not "real" independent cores, but share so much of the surrounding die that you have to make the choice. So it is not a quadcore where you can use only two, but a dualcore with an alternative architecture-part. In a different thread someone said that the part implementing the opcodes are really small, so doing both isn't that much of a tradeoff.