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Intel Wants To Charge $50 To Unlock Your CPU's Full Capabilities
MBCook writes "Turnkey CPU upgrades aren't just for mainframes anymore. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service."
IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on. Some companies only turn on their extra processors for a short time each year (Like end-of-year transaction processing) and if you decide you need some more space in your disk array, it's much more convenient than having to have more disks installed or buy a new disk array.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
IBM's been doing that sort of thing for years. They ship you a mainframe with more processors than you ordered or a disk array with more disk than you ordered, and you can pay them to turn it on. Some companies only turn on their extra processors for a short time each year (Like end-of-year transaction processing) and if you decide you need some more space in your disk array, it's much more convenient than having to have more disks installed or buy a new disk array.
True. My father used to work on a Hewlett-Packard mainframe back in the seventies, and he ordered some extra hard disk space. The HP tech came out, opened the casing of each drive (big freestanding units), reached in the back and flipped a DIP switch. Voila!, extra space. He even showed Dad how to turn on the entire drive if he wanted ... apparently HP didn't care (it wasn't a contract violation or anything) but wouldn't provide any support if you did.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You know that you probably bought a handicapped chip already, right? Chances are a good portion of the economy cpus out there had a core or two disabled just to meet a shipping quota and price point, not because the core failed an integrity check. So, Intel spends some money making the Q/A test disable cores when it needs more chips in the economy bin and less in the high-end one. This just shifts the market a little. Now, instead of disabling a core by frying it completely, they just lock it in firmware. You, the end user, still get your economy priced chip. If you decide to upgrade you just buy the software to unlock it.
This is not some software that works the other way around, you know. The chip you buy isn't going to say "4 Cores and 32Mb cache" and then show up as 2 and 1 meg. The box might tell you, instead "2 core (upgradeable to 4)". The computer upgrade goes from being something geeks know how to do, to something any mom and pop and uncle bob can do. If they can get past the perception of it, no big deal. However, most of those people have no idea what a computer upgrade requires, and telling them that you can do it with software is something they have suspected anyways.
The real problem is that it becomes buy computer -> download spyware, games, p2p crap -> oh no's it is slow -> buy upgrade card -> more crapware -> "why can't I buy another upgrade card?"
Cooking recipes can be patented. Copyright != patent.
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