At one time, there were video cards and processors on the market that could be unlocked by receiving additional computing units.
You can recall the Radeon X800 line, where junior cards, with a good coincidence, turned into a monstrous X800 XT, or AMD Athlon and Phenom processors, in which one or even two cores could be unlocked.
Those days are long gone, but can they return. According to the source, some copies of the latest Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X processors contain not one crystal, as they should, but two. Recall that one die in modern Ryzen 5000 includes eight cores, so only Ryzen 9 models with 12 or 16 cores are allowed two crystals.
However, there are exceptions. Probably, they are partially caused by non-working crystals in low-end CPUs, and since the demand for them is the highest, AMD uses an extra crystal to create low-end models.
Moreover, the second crystal in such CPUs is supposedly not even fully disabled. It is in deep sleep mode, and at times the frequency of the processor cores of the second die went up to 550 MHz. And this, in turn, gives hope for the possibility of activating additional cores. True, so far only hope, since so far no attempts have been made in this direction.
(Via)
