Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff on your CPU

[LUZR4LIFE]

OK, I saw this posted on EOCs.

Hold onto your hyperthreaded horses, because this is liable to whip up an angry mob -- Intel's asking customers to pay extra if they want the full power of their store-bought silicon. An eagle-eyed Engadget reader was surfing the Best Buy shelves when he noticed this $50 card -- and sure enough, Intel websites confirm -- that lets you download software to unlock extra threads and cache on the new Pentium G6951 processor. Hardware.info got their hands on an early sample of the chip and discovered it's actually a full 1MB of L3 cache that's enabled plus HyperThreading support, which translates to a modest but noticeable upgrade. This isn't exactly an unprecedented move, as chip companies routinely sell hardware-locked chips all the time in a process known as binning, but there they have a simpler excuse -- binned chips are typically sold with cores or cache locked because that part of their silicon turned out defective after printing. This new idea is more akin to video games that let you "download" extra weapons and features, when those features were on the disc all along. Still, it's an intriguing business model, and before you unleash your rage in comments, you should know that Intel's just testing it out on this low-end processor in a few select markets for now.

SOURCE

Edited September 19, 2010 by LUZR4LIFE

[ccl0]

thats pretty ****ty in my opinion

[LUZR4LIFE]

Yes, but that will give us geeks something to hack for money. LOL

[pri2sh]

they are cheating consumers , asking money to consumers added feature that is already there is loot. i hope hacker will release that software for free

[LUZR4LIFE]

they are cheating consumers , asking money to consumers added feature that is already there is loot. i hope hacker will release that software for free

They will. I give it a few weeks after they start doing it.

[NTA-217]

its just 1 more reason why AMD looks just that lil bit more attractive than INTEL.