One of the more exciting bits with AMD's Phenom II family is that the processor maker uses the same base core with different series CPUs. This means that dual and tri-core processors are really quad-cores with one or two cores disabled through software. This is most often through the BIOS of the motherboard and this means that the procedure can be reversed, thus unlocking the extra processor cores.
We have seen a couple of articles on this but now Romanian site Lab501 has published an extra interesting article that not only shows how to unlock two more cores from AMD's Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition processor but also goes into detail on which motherboards and processor steppings that work the best for this.
Of the 120 attempted unlockings 73% were successful. Those who failed was usually because one of the disabled processor cores were defective, but evidently most work just fine with all four cores activated.
The entire article can be found at Lab501, though in Romanian: Google Translation.
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AMD Phenom II X2 550 unlocking guide
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