This was never really verified. I'm sure after the 486s were fabbed for a while, intel's defect rate got low enough that they started turning good ones into SX's.
By the time the P5 came along, they stopped playing these games all together and started rating by clock speed alone.
> By the time the P5 came along, they stopped playing these games all together and started rating by clock speed alone.
Weren't the original Celerons P-II chips with half the L2 cache disabled or something? I also seem to remember they were arbitrarily limited to uni-processor functionality, and some modders found you could drill a portion of the chip to make them work on dual and quad CPU mainboards.
If that's correct, I think it's overly generous to say they stopped playing these games (although maybe they took a small break).
In the late nineties I had a "dual-celly" workstation. They were all the rage then (especially if you visited Hard OCP and/or arstechnica back then). IIRC, there was a special adapter that sat between the CPU and the socket which did something to enable SMP.
I also recall some folks doing something with graphite to re-enable disabled traces. Can't remember if it was related to Celerons or not.
Similar examples would be the Promise Ultra66 -> UltraRAID conversion with a simple resistor and flashing of firmware. Of course that game is still being played to this day with graphics cards.
By the time the P5 came along, they stopped playing these games all together and started rating by clock speed alone.