You've got the cause and effect backwards. CPUs ship with disabled cores because that's the only way to recover from manufacturing errors that would otherwise make that segment of the wafer completely useless. Instead of scratches and misplaced dopants costing Intel the full price of a $500 i7, they disable the damaged silicon and sell it as a cheaper i3 or i5. It's literally the only way to make modern CPUs economical and the price discrimination is more of a consequence of physical phenomena. Likewise with RAM clockspeeds: each chip is "burned in" during fab and the most stable ones (with the fewest imperfections) are sold as overclocked RAM while the worst are sold as underclocked low power mobile chips.
If you don't care at all about cost (aka yield), like with RAD hardened CPUs or high throughput serial processors like those from IBM, there is no real room for discrimination and you just pay for the NRE/fabrication plus a profit for the vendor.
If you don't care at all about cost (aka yield), like with RAD hardened CPUs or high throughput serial processors like those from IBM, there is no real room for discrimination and you just pay for the NRE/fabrication plus a profit for the vendor.