> So some market segmentation has to exist. If Intel threw away every chip that had one of the four cores come out broken, they’d lose a lot of money and have to raise prices to compensate.
Except in the case with the Pentium special edition 2 cores and i3 parts, Intel actually designed a separate two core part that wouldn't have the benefit of re-enabling cores among hobbyists.
And then there's the artificial segmentation by disabling Xeon support among consumer boards... even though the Xeon branded parts were identical to i7s (with the GPU disabled) and adding (or removing) a pin on a socket between generations even though the chipset supports the CPU itself (and the CPU runs on the socket fine with an adapter.)
Intel definitely did everything they could to make it as confusing as possible.
Its just the behavior of a monopolist where they are making their product line as efficient as possible by milking every last penny out of every single customer.
In a truly competitive ecosystem features that have additional cost would be the only ones that actually cost more, and artificial limits wouldn't work because the vendor with less market share would just throw them in for free.
So you would expect product segmentation along the lines of core counts, dram channels, etc but not really between for example high end desktop/low end server because there would be a gradual mixing of the two markets.
And it turns out the market is still competitive because Arm and AMD are driving a bus through some of those super high margin products that are only artificially differentiated from the lower end parts by the marketing department or some additional engineering time that actually breaks functionality in the product (ecc, locked multipliers, iommu's, 64-bit MMIO windows, etc).
Except in the case with the Pentium special edition 2 cores and i3 parts, Intel actually designed a separate two core part that wouldn't have the benefit of re-enabling cores among hobbyists.
And then there's the artificial segmentation by disabling Xeon support among consumer boards... even though the Xeon branded parts were identical to i7s (with the GPU disabled) and adding (or removing) a pin on a socket between generations even though the chipset supports the CPU itself (and the CPU runs on the socket fine with an adapter.)
Intel definitely did everything they could to make it as confusing as possible.