[laumars]

As I said, they were working 4 and 8 core CPUs that had a working core disabled and then solder at a cheaper price as 3 or 6 core CPUs.

The reason AMD did this was because they had the genius idea of selling off some faulty CPUs at a cheaper price but with the faulty core disabled. However those cheaper CPUs sold so well that AMD ended up having to disable working cores on non-faulty units to meet demand.

Since you could actually unlock those cores, lots more people started to buy 3 and 6 core CPUs in the hope that “CPU roulette” might pay off and they’d end up with a stable 4 or 8 core computer for the cost of a 3 or 6 core one.