Thoughts on software-defined silicon

> I had a 3-core AMD a while back (just scrapped it), and I understood that a lot of these chips were actually 4-cores with a core disabled.

I had one of those too. Stable as a rock with the extra core enabled for 12 years now, and it could even handle overclocking on top of that. The weird BIOS dance to unlock it put me off ever trying to run Coreboot on the thing though.