Dual Cores Sold Working as Single Cores!?

Well, I've heard something today that struck me as odd. A lot of AMD processors that are sold in laptops and desktops are sold with with cores disabled. Has anyone heard of anything like this? I work at Best Buy and my manager told me that a lot of the AMD processors are sold with a core disabled by default.

I've been searching the web for an explanation as to why AMD would sell their processors like that but can't find anything. Does anyone know why dual core AMD processors would be set to work as single cores by default?

 

This kind of thing is not at all unusual in the computer industry. There could be a variety of reasons, here are a couple off the top of my head:
- one core is damaged or not up to spec
- there is a shortage of the single core machines and AMD has commitments to meet
- due to the economies of scale, it might be cheaper to have a single "production line" instead of two.

 

The dual cores mentioned are advertised as dual cores. Both cores are operational and are sold as such. After a little more digging it looks like this might be a feature that Vista implements.

 

The Tri-cores that AMD came up with are quads with one failure. Never heard of it applying to dual cores but as jdean mentioned, its not uncommon to have one production run for economic reasons and then disable, or never enable certain features in the exact same chip to sell at different pricepoints.