>> 4-People can not unblock features of cheap cards to make the same things expensive cards does(it is very common to make only one chip to get mass production cost and then to use some cheap hardware or software switch to deactivate features on cheap cards).
This is also sometimes done with slightly defective chips. E.g. AMD has sold some quad-cores as three-core cpu's when one of the cores has failed some quality control check. Sometimes they can be enabled and they work fine but there may be a risk involved.
I know this is sometimes also done because of marketing reasons. Some years ago, IBM was selling additional Java or DB "accelerator" chips to high-end servers. They were in fact the same kind of processor that the server shipped with but they were crippled with microcode so they could only run the JVM or a DB2 server or something. I very much dislike this practice, talk about wasted engineering effort.
This is also sometimes done with slightly defective chips. E.g. AMD has sold some quad-cores as three-core cpu's when one of the cores has failed some quality control check. Sometimes they can be enabled and they work fine but there may be a risk involved.
I know this is sometimes also done because of marketing reasons. Some years ago, IBM was selling additional Java or DB "accelerator" chips to high-end servers. They were in fact the same kind of processor that the server shipped with but they were crippled with microcode so they could only run the JVM or a DB2 server or something. I very much dislike this practice, talk about wasted engineering effort.