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[Mark J Dulcey]

On 4/12/2010 12:48 PM, Mark Komarinski wrote:
>
> Motherboard manufacturers do this too with their PCBs.  You can clearly
> see spots where chips belong but they aren't there.  Manufacturers
> probably have the volume to have separate SMT lines and skip some
> parts.  Is that dishonest as well?

That's a bit different from the example he cited earlier because the 
parts actually aren't there, but are omitted to reduce manufacturing 
costs. The motherboard that lacks the FireWire chip or the USB 3.0 chip 
probably does costs a few dollars less to make.

Another tricky case is what NVidia and AMD (and likely some other 
companies) do with chips. For example, a 9800GT and a 9800GTX have 
exactly the same GPU, but the version on the 9800GT only has 112 of the 
128 computing units enabled. (The same logic applies to newer NVidia 
product lines, I just happen to know the numbers for that one.) An AMD 
Phenom II X3 CPU actually contains four cores but one is turned off. 
(AMD may eventually produce X3 parts that use a different mask and don't 
contain a fourth core at all but to the best of my knowledge all the 
current ones are as I describe.) There are unauthorized third-party 
programs for both that can re-enable the parts of the chip that have 
been turned off.

But in these cases, the disabled parts of the chip may have been turned 
off for a reason. They don't work at all, they work but fail under some 
operating conditions such as extreme temperature, or the chip overall 
fails to meet its power consumption and thermal specs if all the cores 
are enabled. Then again, they may be perfect chips that the company is 
selling off as the less capable versions because they don't have enough 
of the not-fully-functional parts to meet demand at the reduced price. 
So... is your 3-core CPU an honest sale if the fourth core is defective 
but a ripoff if the fourth core works?