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Comment by throw_nbvc1234 | Hacker News Reader

A decade or so ago you used to be able to unlock cores on certain AMD CPU's; there was no guarantee that the core would be stable though. The core could be fine without heavy load and have errors when pushed closer to 100%.

If there was a similar level of binning done for Tesla batteries they should be able to limit the battery especially if there are safety concerns; sounds like that's not the case here though.

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> A decade or so ago you used to be able to unlock cores on certain AMD CPU's; there was no guarantee that the core would be stable though. The core could be fine without heavy load and have errors when pushed closer to 100%.

That also used to happen a lot with Intel CPUs, especially late in a product cycle: after refining fab their yields would be so good there wasn't any "bad" part to bin down, so they'd just soft-disable cores on high-end parts (I think after a while manufacturers started fusing the cores).

That sort of thing has been going on for a long time. The 32K TRS-80 Color Computer often had 64K RAM chips installed. Early on they were populated with "half bad" 64k RAM chips, with a jumper set to which half contained the bad memory. Later in the product cycle, half bad chips really didn't exist anymore, but Radio Shack still wanted to be able to charge more for 64K models, so they still jumper disabled one of the banks of memory on models sold as 32K. Lots of people figured out they could remove the jumper to get a free upgrade of double the memory.

At least as early as the late 90s, servers were sometimes sold with parts—disks, controller cards, CPUs (in the days when multi-socket was more common), et c—disabled in software, unlockable if you paid for an upgrade.

This is true of test bench equipment today. They use this for vertical marketing. I'm fine with it since it's mostly just software anyway.

Yes you can hack it, and people do, but if you're going to use it for proper validation and certification, you're going to pay for those features anyway.

I would hope for a safety critical and potentially hazardous part like the battery they would do more than toggle a license bit in the software.

More than a decade ago. ATi 9800SE could also be modded to 9800pro which was probably the best card at the time.

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