There Are HIDDEN Cores In Your CPU! #Shorts

Why might your CPU have disabled cores that you can't use? #Shorts

[JarrodsTech]

Anthony: Pay more for more cores
Me: *frantically downloading more cores*

[SB-pfrc]

would be cool to see a video about historical CPUs where you could enable functional-but-disabled cores, and how they were diabled and why.

[FirstnameLastname-pybc]

Ah I remember Phantom x3 with most having functional 4th core and everyone enabling them

[jimjiggles]

Brings back the memories of my 960T that was stable with the 2 other cores unlocked. It served me well for a good while.

[shinevisionsv]

My Ryzen 1600 actually has 8 cores. AMD leaves those cores on if they are good enough. It probably was a 1700 or 1700X but didnt meet the specs so they sold it as a 1600. It even shows up as a 1600 but... with 8 cores.

[miskyy]

Ah yes. Who remember fun times when you could unlock fourth core in Phenom II X3?

[illitero]

Shout out to the dual core Phenom II 555 Black Edition that could be unlocked to a quad core that showed up as a B55. You'd win the lottery if it was stable upon unlocking, but when you pushed your luck with overclocking you'd discover how engineers are smarter than you and disabled those cores for a reason, hahaha. That was my story before miraculously being approved for a warranty exchange, the replacement being so bad that it'd almost immediately crash when I tried unlocking cores.

[rfouR_]

Back in the day you could get a Phenom II X2 and there was a pretty good chance you could unlock it to a 3-4 core CPU with the right mobo. Though sometimes you'd be have to clock those cores lower or they just wouldn't have the same OC headroom, but it was free cores for a fraction of the price!

[a.i.privilege]

<closes eyes and reminisces about unlocking a 4th core on phenom II 3 core chips> ahhhh the good ole days.

[Stef.Cata]

Yeah Anthony I know, thanks for reminding me that I can't re-enable them

[matsv]

That is old news. What is a bit newer is that some cpu got a tiny cpu running a sort of firewal software inside the cpu

[evl]

Man, miss those good old days with Athlon ACC~

[gamerjorts]

I remember my old 6800GS video card having 2 pipelines disabled. You could just launch RivaTuner, feed the GPU a little more power, unlock the pipelines, and suddenly you had 6800GT performance.

[Minitomate]

That's what I call a big brain move of making a good use of defective cores and saving a big buck by selling them as lower tier CPUs.
This does also can apply to GPUs, right?

[mrterrellowens]

Seems like an awesome “do not try this at home” followup where you guys try to enable the extra cores via microcode edits!

[RonOverdrive]

This has to be the fasted Techquickie I've ever seen.

[dan_loup]

Also there's the whole intel ME and AMD PSP hidden core stuffs.

[DaxtonAnderson]

I remember in the late 00s/early 10s there were Athlon/Phenom CPUs that came with unlockable cores. 3-core CPUs were popular at the time, with 1 disabled core. Also 4 core processors with 2 disabled cores which were just Phenom II X6 that didn't pass QA. Usually these chips overclocked poorly but they worked fine unlocked!

[arisupersnake]

We did that with phenoms. They laser them off nowadays. Sad violin sounds

[MyChevySonic]

I remember when the Radeon 9800 SE had its faulty pipelines disabled via drivers, so a custom driver could re-enable them. If you dropped the clock a bit, you could game with much more performance with minimal artifacts.