How can you find out if you can unlock hidden cores without buying the CPU?
9 replies, posted
I'm currently doing an extreme budget build and I am eying a a few Dual Core CPU's and was wondering if there was a way to know if they would be able to unlock cores.
Assuming you mean on AMD chips, as I've never heard of it on Intel chips, there is no way real of knowing without trying it. Some chips will have faulty cores and other won't. Your best bet may be to look up batch numbers or something and see if you can find a commonly unlockable batch of chips and try to find one yourself. Other option is buy it from someone who knows they have an unlockable chip.
My Intel I7 3820 seems to have locked cores too. It has been activated as a quad core with Hyperthreating, but there seem to be 4 more cores :O , haven't found out how to unlock them, or there just for Hyperthreating -_-
:P
[QUOTE=Nyhmps;41589444]My Intel I7 3820 seems to have locked cores too. It has been activated as a quad core with Hyperthreating, but there seem to be 4 more cores :O , haven't found out how to unlock them, or there just for Hyperthreating -_-
:P[/QUOTE]
I've been on a different forum that is enthusiast pc based and have never heard of unlocking more cores on any i5's or i7s. It's not possible.
This might help you :)
[url]http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/285541-28-unlock-hidden-cores[/url]
Intel does put their i3's, i5's and i7's at different processes, as far as I can remember. However, they DO sell variants of each processor a little cheaper, for example, by turning off the defective graphics chip that some of these processors have.
[QUOTE=Nyhmps;41589444]My Intel I7 3820 seems to have locked cores too. It has been activated as a quad core with Hyperthreating, but there seem to be 4 more cores :O , haven't found out how to unlock them, or there just for Hyperthreating -_-
:P[/QUOTE]
Those aren't extra cores, Hyperthreading just lets one core do two things. Devoting 50% of it's resources to each task.
[QUOTE=Del91;41610840]Those aren't extra cores, Hyperthreading just lets one core do two things. Devoting 50% of it's resources to each task.[/QUOTE]
Sadly, even that 50% is purely theoretical talk. In practice it'll be less.
Semantics, more or less.
[QUOTE=xNickston;41594908]Intel does put their i3's, i5's and i7's at different processes, as far as I can remember. However, they DO sell variants of each processor a little cheaper, for example, by turning off the defective graphics chip that some of these processors have.[/QUOTE]
Intel has done binning of higher end dies into lower end ones (ie. Pentiums into Celerons or quads into duals, etc.) But unlike AMD where they just disable the defective cores/cache, Intel laser cuts the defective parts on the die so it's impossible to use them again.
Though it's rather strange Intel never released a tri core processor, they seem to like even numbers.
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