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On my 2 year old laptop I have an Intel Celeron Processor (The one made in June something of 2008) and last night I finally decided to tear it apart. My reasoning was, that I am going to buy a new laptop soon (I want a 64 bit system ) and lo and behold, my celeron processor has 2 cores on the chip itself. I ran several software tests on it in Linux (mostly just profiling and etc.) then I ran a full diagnostic on it and turns out that the second core was never used in any of it. So I looked over it through a magnifying glass and found a pin that was blocking a section from passing anything to this other core. I pulled the pin out and popped my processor in my laptop. Windows refused to boot at first except into Safe Mode because of a hardware change. It was there that my PC was re-evaluated and while previously I had a 3.5 out of 5.0 according to Vista, I know have a 4.1/5.0 thus Aero now was enabled. I then tried something crazy, I popped in the Arch64 net-install disk and VIOLA!!! It loaded and installed Arch64 successfully. Thus, I converted what was a 32 bit processor into a now 64 bit processor by (carefully) removing a pin. After doing research it seems other people found this out too and am wondering to myself, if Intel created this cheap of a 64bit processor, why didn't they market it like that and/or use this as their low-end 64 bit processor? It's all very fishy to me and I really don't know what to make of it.
As an update, I have re-soldered the pin on and Windows still sees the 2nd core. Arch64 however refuses to boot because it's trying to boot 64bit instructions on a 32bit processor again. It seems that since Windows saw that it was there, it has loaded a new driver (some weird "Intel Blah blah blah" [didn't write it down and don't feel like rebooting, sorry] ) that wasn't loaded before. It's still running Vista 32bit (NOT going to upgrade), but it still sees that the other core is there. Any thoughts on this?
All chips are usually something else, that didn't make the grade. So while it may work, it can't be trusted to be accurate in everything it does. You may be ok - do you feel lucky ?
Where do you think the triple core chips came from ? (failed quads !).
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Genuine Intel(R) CPU 575 @ 2.00GHz
stepping : 13
cpu MHz : 1994.991
cache size : 1024 KB
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss tm pbe syscall nx lm constant_tsc up arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl aperfmperf pni dtes64 monitor ds_cpl tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm lahf_lm dts
bogomips : 3991.23
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
And smoker, I feel very lucky!
This isn't really a problem, I'm just wondering: 1.) Why this pin was there in the first place? 2.) Why would Windows be able to see the 2nd core but not Linux with that pin in?
The Celeron 575 is somewhat a Core 2 Solo processor, means it is a Core 2 Duo (which is 64 bit) with one deactivated core. I would assume that on of the cores is not functioning correct, so they have deactivated it and sold it as single core CPU. It may be that you have luck, and it will function correctly, but I doubt so.
Anyways, your CPU was a 64 bit CPU from the beginning of its life.
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) and lo and behold, my celeron processor has 2 cores on the chip itself. I ran several software tests on it in Linux (mostly just profiling and etc.) then I ran a full diagnostic on it and turns out that the second core was never used in any of it. So I looked over it through a magnifying glass and found a pin that was blocking a section from passing anything to this other core. I pulled the pin out and popped my processor in my laptop. Windows refused to boot at first except into Safe Mode because of a hardware change. It was there that my PC was re-evaluated and while previously I had a 3.5 out of 5.0 according to Vista, I know have a 4.1/5.0 thus Aero now was enabled. I then tried something crazy, I popped in the Arch64 net-install disk and VIOLA!!! It loaded and installed Arch64 successfully. Thus, I converted what was a 32 bit processor into a now 64 bit processor by (carefully) removing a pin. After doing research it seems other people found this out too and am wondering to myself, if Intel created this cheap of a 64bit processor, why didn't they market it like that and/or use this as their low-end 64 bit processor? It's all very fishy to me and I really don't know what to make of it. 
