n0002 back from the shop with downgraded BIOS and no hardware changes. The current scenario goes like this: during n0002's last visit to hardware people (for its memory problem), its BIOS was ungraded. The hypothesis is that the new BIOS detected some momentary voltage problem and decided to make two (of the four) cores hotplug-able. After downgrading BIOS all four cores are again visible. n0002 was hooked-up again, and looks normal. Some heavy CPU testing is in order.