Ryzen 5 1600X/1600 With Fully-Working 8 Cores Found in Retail

Some users in Korean forum CoolN.KR have reported having bought Ryzen 5 1600X and Ryzen 5 1600 processors with fully working 8-cores in the wild. Normally, Ryzen 5 1600X and 1600 both have 6 cores and 12 threads. These incidences are not like your older Phenom where a BIOS core unlock was needed to convert say a Phenom X2 B55 dual-core to a fully capable Phenom X4 955, the Ryzen 5 processors in these reports are fully unlocked out of the box. Their clock speeds and L1 cache are still the same as the original Ryzen 5 1600 at 576KB of L1 cache. Given the extra two cores though, its easy for the Ryzen 5 1600X/1600 to compete with a Ryzen 7 1800 in benchmarks. Anyone with such a find would be happy to know that a Ryzen 5 1600X would be half the price of a Ryzen 7 1700X.

Redditor Rigred has posted a guide on how to decipher the serial numbers on AMD chips:

SKU: YD1700BBM88AE
BATCH: UA 1706PGT
SERIAL: 9R6xxxxxxxxxx

UA [2digits-YEAR][2digits-WEEK] [3letters-Assembly and Diffusion]

UA   1706       PGT
UA [YY][WW]  [1][2][3]

YY -> Year
WW -> Week

1 -> ATMP Location ([P]enang, Malaysia or [S]uzhou, China) 
2 -> Last letters of ATMP location.
3 -> Wafer Production ([S]aratoga or [T]exas) 

Via this method, users have been able to determine that the 8-core Ryzen chips posted were from a batch manufactured in Malaysia on the 36th week of 2017.

As to why this is happening, we’ll never know. It could be a production slip but could point to what we already know that AMD eventually gimps fully-capable high-end chips to convert for its mid-market and lower SKUs. AMD could also be possibly simply increasing Ryzen 5 stocks by rebranding Ryzen 7 chips. Regardless of reasons, some users will be very happy to receive such a bonus with their chip purchase.

If just in case you never checked, you can go ahead and view your task manager right now to see if you have 8-cores on your Ryzen 5 1600 system.