The Odd Story of Factory-Downgraded 486s (2020)
I've got a similar story.In 1998 a had a summer job, as a programmer, in a little shop that built computers. At the time there was a short of Pentium II 300Mhz chips. One day the logistics guy mentioned they had gotten a batch of Pentium II 300Mhz marked with an operating voltage of 2.0V, instead of the usual 2.8V. Hmm.Intel had taken a bunch of their most expensive CPUs, PII-450Mhz, using the brand new 250nm process and rebranded them as the cheapest CPUs which were at the time built with a 350nm process. You could just take this, stick in a motherboard an change the base frequency and you'd have the best CPU Intel could make.We never sold any of those CPU to customers. We all bought ourselves new CPUs that day.