This form of "segmentation" is something I've always found appalling. A part like this is no different from a high-end part; it's an identical design that is intentionally damaged so it doesn't cut in to high-end sales. It comes out of the factory fully-featured and Intel charges you extra if you want them to skip breaking it.
The free market, in its beautiful efficiency, leads to the intentional crippling of millions of state-of-the-art chips.
I understand it seems weird with hardware, but I think it's similar to how we charge for software.
Try this thought experiment:
1. Based on market analysis, Intel decides it could sell a part with hyperthreading for $1K, and one without for $500.
2. Engineers start building both chips.
3. Because the chips themselves cost little to make ($45 and $50 for non-HT vs HT let's say?), and it costs $10M of engineering time to design each chip, engineers realize it would actually be far more efficient to design one chip with hyperthreading, and disable it for the lower-end SKU.
I'm curious which part you object to in this sequence. The sale price of chips is mostly amortizing very high R&D costs, not unit distribution costs. There are a variety of different types of customers to serve with different price points, while designing different chips is expensive, so it ends up being logical to make one chip with different features enabled.
Software and web services are the ultimate expression of this kind of economics. It costs almost 0 to serve an additional customer, but a lot of R&D and operations to build it.
Would you call a web service "intentionally damaged" when they don't give you all features for the same price (or for free?)
This market where they can build chips for $50 and sell them for $1000 only exists because there is a (near) duopoly on x86 (afaik mostly due to patents).
If the HT chip costs almost the same as the non HT chip then maybe they should just be selling HT chips for $500 instead, that would probably be what would happen if there was actually competition in the x86 market.
What about the dies that aren't 100% perfect, and don't work at those high end specs? If there's a defect in a core or two, or in some area of cache, why not trim it down to a lower spec part and sell it for something (rather than scrapping it)?
I think the case of HT is more pure "segmentation", and a little different. I bet most of the parts that ship with HT disabled have all threads working.
The number of transistors involved in HT are quite small. There are probably very few cores where one thread works and the other doesn't, compared to the number of CPUs that work or don't work because their cache or something more fundamental is screwed up by a defect.
I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even test for one thread working and the other not, and the "defeaturing" is a separate step after yield binning.
On the other hand, I'm sitting here perfectly happy with my $90-$100 i3 at home, which would not have been as cheap without price bucketing and all the people buying expensive i7s and server chips subsidizing the R&D.
Do I ever use more than 2 cores? Rarely.
Oh actually it has 4 cores, guess that changed with the newer chips.
By having different feature levels, they can downgrade parts that don't pass at a higher class of features. For example, maybe part of the cache is faulty then you can disable half of it and sell as a lower grade part.
The free market, in its beautiful efficiency, leads to the intentional crippling of millions of state-of-the-art chips.