The professor gave an interesting fact that the reason for the GTX 480 to only contain 15 cores is due to hardware defects screened out by NVIDIA. When a processor is fabricated and tested, if a core did not pass NVIDIA's tests, the core can be disabled and the chip rebranded as a lower end chip. An interesting fact is that sometimes you can "Unlock" a graphics card core with a EEPROM flash, if it hasn't been laser cutted disabled. An example case here is the GTX 465 which is just a GTX 470 with some cores disabled (and possibly lasered off).
The professor gave an interesting fact that the reason for the GTX 480 to only contain 15 cores is due to hardware defects screened out by NVIDIA. When a processor is fabricated and tested, if a core did not pass NVIDIA's tests, the core can be disabled and the chip rebranded as a lower end chip. An interesting fact is that sometimes you can "Unlock" a graphics card core with a EEPROM flash, if it hasn't been laser cutted disabled. An example case here is the GTX 465 which is just a GTX 470 with some cores disabled (and possibly lasered off).
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