Intel To Offer CPU Upgrades Via Software

derGoldstein writes "Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. In the past, the upgrades gave you HyperThreading and more L3 cache. This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency: 'Intel Upgrade Service offers three different upgrades on second generation Core processors: Intel Core i3-2312M processor, Intel Core i3-2102 processor, and Intel Pentium G622 processor.' The page provides benchmarks of the 3 upgrade options."

Comments

Pay for overclocking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder how long until it is hacked to work for free?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[mehrotra.akash]

Its more of the original chip is underclocked than the software overclocking it

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Idbar]

Are they charging for it? I didn't see that anywhere in the link and I downloaded the installer. Unluckily, I have an i5 so I'm not even trying.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[larppaxyz]

Just tried it. It was free.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[mcavic]

I hate that. What's the advantage of selling a crippled piece of hardware? It costs the same to make, and it sells for less.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[kheldan]

I wonder how long until people are downloading hacked versions that either brick your processor permanently or permanently make your processor part of a botnet?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It usually suggests that competitive pressures on the seller, at least in that segment, are sufficiently low that they derive greater benefit from improved price discrimination than they do harm from making their prices less competitive. Given their fab prowess vs. AMD, it isn't totally surprising that Intel sees themselves doing better by voluntarily cutting the value of low end parts, rather than letting higher-end buyers get away with paying less.

(Secondarily, and specific to this particular instance, it probably doesn't hurt that consumer PCs frequently get crufted up and 'slow' over their lifetime and Joe User has no idea why. It's rarely the processor's fault, so what Intel is selling won't help them; but "make your computer faster!" is a well established product line, and Intel's offering won't technically be a lie...)

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Ravon Rodriguez]

Some people are willing to shell out more money for a faster processor, while other people are not. It costs more to produce genuinely different CPU's than to just cripple one CPU, so the idea is that they make a large profit from the people who will pay for the faster CPU, and a lower profit from those who won't.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[beelsebob]

The people buying the crippled versions for less wouldn't buy the uncrippled versions for more anyway, so you gain.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Osgeld]

its not like they design them to be crippled, they make a batch, they test that batch and sort that batch

would you suggest that they only target what they are going for and throw the others away? that will drive down chip cost for sure

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Ken_g6]

I wonder if it can be hacked to make these processors run at any speed that's input from the software? Maybe we can finally get our i3 2100K chips?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[PopeRatzo]

its not like they design them to be crippled, they make a batch, they test that batch and sort that batch

I've heard that before, but I'm not sure it makes sense. You're saying that they make a batch of CPUs, then the fast ones they put in one bin and the less fast ones in another bin and then sell them according to how fast they are. That would work for someone with an egg farm, where eggs are sold by size, but if Intel was really doing it the way you suggest, then there would be absolutely no way for them to do any product planning. What if a batch came out that didn't have any slower processors? Would they then tell their customers, I'm sorry,. there's a shortage of i3s? The price of processors would then fluctuate a lot more than it does now.

I'm pretty sure that there is not as much variation in the speed of processors coming out of a fab plant as there is in the size of eggs that hens lay. If their performance can be readily increased with a software download, that means they were purposely crippled, with a plan to upsell users.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Anonymous Coward]

You misunderstand. They can, and do, sell faster processors as "crippled" slower processors. Their testing just identifies the maximum standard speed, and then the chips can be packaged and sold as any slower chip they need.

What's interesting here is that Intel is saying that all chips of these types are capable of running at a faster speed.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Osgeld]

I am pretty sure unlike eggs CPU's wont go bad, and they dont hurry up and make a custom batch when the vendor calls, again its not food and does not have to be made when you order it

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[TheLink]

They (which includes AMD) already do it. When they get many good batches but more people are only willing to pay for a cheaper and slower CPUs, they just cripple some of them.

They used to do this by zapping stuff (fuses etc). But this sort of crippling is usually permanent ( there are some exceptions I guess).

Now they are just making it nonpermanent, so you don't actually have to buy a new CPU (or a new laptop -it's not usually easy to physically upgrade the CPU on a laptop). IBM has been doing this stuff for years too - ship a server capable of doing a lot more, when the customer needs more performance/capacity, they call IBM, and IBM unlocks it. Sometimes even temporarily- the customer might only need the extra capacity temporarily and so only pay for it for that period.

What this shows is AMD isn't competitive enough. If AMD's CPUs were much faster, Intel wouldn't be able to do this - since they wouldn't be able to make enough money from selling slower CPUs.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Bert64]

It actually costs more to make, since they have to implement the process for selling the upgrades, and have to make some effort to stop people just doing it for free.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[PixetaledPikachu]

I hate that. What's the advantage of selling a crippled piece of hardware? It costs the same to make, and it sells for less.

so they can put higher pricetag on uncrippled or less crippled parts

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[grimmjeeper]

I'm pretty sure that there is not as much variation in the speed of processors coming out of a fab plant as there is in the size of eggs that hens lay.

Having worked for a major chip company, I can tell you that your assumption here is incorrect. There really is that much variation in chips coming off the assembly line. In fact, I'd wager that the variation in chips coming off the fab is more varied than the size of chicken eggs.

It's the side effect of pushing higher and higher density within the chip. Modern equipment could probably push out extremely consistent 90nm designs. But 90nm chips were out of date 5 years ago. In order to be competitive, you have to push the most density out of the equipment you have. And that means that you get significant variation in your product, even within one wafer. The companies build in flexibility to the chip to allow for this variation. There are "fuses" built in to each chip specifically to disable the broken parts of the chip. If the L3 cache on a processor is totally hosed, they will blow the fuses for it and completely turn it off. But since the rest of the chip is fine they can still sell it, albeit at a discount. Even the maximum speed can be fused into the chip. The testing procedures ramp up voltage and clock frequency until the chip starts failing. Then they step it down a notch or two and fuse it there.

AMD has never produced a 45nm dual or triple core design. I'm not sure they even made one in 65nm. The x2 and x3 processors are just x4 (or x6?) chips with one or more dead cores and maybe less cache, depending on the specific chip. Intel does the exact same thing with their core series processors. That's just the way processor companies do business. It's been that way for decades.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[nabsltd]

What's interesting here is that Intel is saying that all chips of these types are capable of running at a faster speed.

Intel is just finally admitting what everybody already knows.

Since the first Core i7, every CPU Intel has sold can be trivially overclocked by 10%, by 20% with any decent motherboard and aftermarket cooler, and 40% with some hard work. Meanwhile, the new unlocked Sandy Bridge CPUs can be overclocked by 35% with any aftermarket cooler and no effort.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[couchslug]

It will still require enough effort that most people won't do it.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[maxwell demon]

So how is a software upgrade going to fix those broken units? An upgrade will only be possible if they have downgraded it further than necessary.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Joce640k]

its not like they design them to be crippled, they make a batch, they test that batch and sort that batch

Nope.

They make a batch, they check what today's CPU orders are, they sort/cripple as needed.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[WidgetGuy]

This practice has been going on since the dawn of computing.

Back in the early 80's I was in charge of writing image processing (picture and movie) software using Data General minis to talk to the gamma cameras (this was in the Nuclear Medicine department of a famous American heart hospital). The Data Generals talked to a Perkin-Elmer mainframe (via HyperChannel) which was the machine on which most of my programs were run.

We ordered a processor upgrade from PE. A couple of days later, the tech from PE arrived to "install" it. I was curious, so I made sure to watch the whole operation over his shoulder. It was over and done with in about 30 seconds. He pulled a circuit board out of the machine, cut a tracer on the board, plugged it back in.

The bill was over $7,000.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[mabhatter654]

Except with CPUs it would be impractical to test every "location" on the wafer, so they have to make a map of which "chickens" will always make bigger eggs and which don't. That's where over clocking comes in because you might get one of the "smaller" chickens that only made Jumbo eggs 75% of the time so they had to exclude that spot. They also have daily shipments they need to make so they might need to fill some cartons with bigger eggs than on the label.

The NEWS here is that Intel has said in the "overclocking wars" that these chips were "burned in". Meaning they had firmware code that couldn't be changed after they left the factory. That's been the "party line" for the last DECADE of fixed multiplier chips.. now Intel is saying they might sell some upgrades?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[hughbar]

This has been going on since the 1970s when I entered the industry. It was called 'functional pricing' then, very popular with IBM. Pay $x more per month for a big printer you are renting, they will remove a couple of resistors and it will go faster [OK more complex than that, but you see the principle].

If companies can do this systematically, it's [another] sign of market failure, in my opinion. Again in the 1970 Amdahl began to eat IBM's lunch with a lot of cheaper plug-compatible equipment and spoilt this little game somewhat.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Senior manager: All of these processors can go 3ghz.
Junior Manager: But no one wants to pay for the 3ghz.
SM: Lets underclock them and then sell them upgrades.
JM: Thats a great idea sir.

Does that help, or do we need to get the sock puppets out?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[camperslo]

Well maybe the employees that work for Intel can decide that if they're not getting wages that seem fair in proportion to what managers are getting, they can just move a little slower. No need to have different employees, they can just adjust their productivity to match the price. How efficient that would be. Management has already set a precedent, so they shouldn't have any ground to complain, right?

Burger stands could just use some slightly foul dressing to offer lower priced options without having to cook differently otherwise. I wonder if Intel is violating some prior art, like spit in the soup for customers that don't tip well?

If chips have a back-door to control one feature, what else is in there? Can they be really secure if they've got hidden controls or debug modes? People were upset when Intel was going to digitally serialize their chips. Whatever happened with that? Of course if chips can be uniquely upgraded it seems we know.

I hope Intel products get more serious competition. Also, the fuss about power consumption should be just for laptops. Feel the top of a recent iMac sometime. Hopefully Steve pressuring them will help. Did Intel ever come up with some answer to small geometry leakage currents besides lowering the voltage? Shutting down sections helped too, but a process that isn't prone to the problem is needed. The Core series was a huge leap from the Pentium 4, but it doesn't really seem like we've seen that much since considering how long it has been. It could be worse. At least CPUs aren't licensed by the year, waiting to expire after some freshness date. (the way it feels with Apple expiring old apps by omitting Rosetta in Lion)

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[hairyfeet]

Exactly and Intel as in TFA has a history of "pre crippling" the hardware you buy from them. it was a real PITA for me when XP Mode first came out as it was hell trying to tell which Intel chips supported virtualization and which didn't.

This is one of the reasons I recommend folks switch to AMD. with the AMD chips ALL the features are supported by ALL the CPUs, even the newer Semprons have virtualization and with most of the new boards you can take your chances and see if the dual you got is a triple or quad that they just turned off a couple of cores to make quota or if they were bad cores because unlike Intel they don't cut the traces. in some chips there have been reports of even turning on the L3 cache that was turned off to make a Phenom into an Athlon.

After the virtualization bullshit, the bribery, and finally the compiler scandal I decided to put my money where my mouth was and after being a lifelong Intel man switched my home and shop to AMD exclusively and frankly myself and my customers couldn't be happier. Unless you are in one of those rare niches (granted more geeks here may fit than most places) where you literally squeeze every chip for every MHz of power the AMD chips are frankly insanely overpowered for most tasks and dirt cheap to boot. No wondering if chip X supports feature Y, they all support everything, and you can build a quite nice quad for less than $400.

So don't support the pre crippled bullshit go AMD. I've found so far in my own personal tests the only thing AMD does is turn off cores to fit price points and they are often trivial to turn back on for $0, making them an even better deal if you don't mind taking the chance that the dual or triple you bought is actually a dual or triple because of a bad yield. I've found at least in my shop about 1/3rd of the ones turned off are done so because it had a bad core. But frankly the new Athlon and Phenom quads are so cheap and so overpowered for what most folks do that I don't even bother with less anymore.

But it is certainly better IMHO to give the customer a chance at a free upgrade than it is to nickel and dime them like Intel. You should have seen the look on my last triple core customer's face when I told him he got a free upgrade to a quad. Talk about a happy customer!

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Ambient Sheep]

Yup, back in the mid-80s I worked for a firm that wrote EPoS software for petrol filling stations (gas stations). There was a whole extra feature set that could be enabled simply by programming a special character (might just have been an "@" sign, I forget) into one of the programmable setup fields, and we charged quite a bit for it.

Our field-service engineers got so embarrassed at this (as did those of us in the software department with a conscience), that if time allowed they'd often open the box up and pretend to fiddle inside, maybe faking an EPROM change, to do it.

Eventually one or two site managers got wise, and the word spread as to what the secret was, and everyone was getting it for free, so we had to make it so it really WAS an EPROM change...

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[LingNoi]

hmm, can you put this into the form of a car analogy?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Z00L00K]

How much comes from overclocking, and how much comes from better microcode?

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[Neil Boekend]

They did so in the Pentium age: they didn't have the process under control yest so there were a lot of errors: some chips had pieces of cache that didn't work, some had a lower max clock speed. They sold them as Celerons I believe.

Re:Pay for overclocking?

[DamienNightbane]

It's like selling a V8 with two cylinders disabled by the on-board computer as a V6 and then charging the customers for an upgrade that activates them and unlocks the original V8 power.

Stop fucking about Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

... and improve performance.

Where's my real-time raytracing ffs ?

Preposterous.

[Anonymous Coward]

So they are basically admitting to charging differents amounts of money for the same chip. Why would anyone agree to this?

Re:Preposterous.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Intel has been doing that forever, from the 486SX, which just had a broken FPU, to todays chips which are numbered/rated by which tests they pass/fail.

Re:Preposterous.

[Ethanol-fueled]

That practice is all over the electronics industry. Shit, where I work, we literally check a box, click a button, and wait fifteen seconds while the new feature is uploaded to the widget.

Then we charge the customer thousands of dollars for that one added feature. I shit you not.

Re:Preposterous.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is very true, even in items you wouldn't expect it. Like industrial welders.

Re:Preposterous.

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

Because it costs the same amount of money to make a fast chip or a slow one. But many people wont pay more than $xx for a cpu at a specific performance level.

This sort of thing has gone on in the electronics and computer business for 50 years. Back in the 60's and for several decades IBM offered a single printer that could print at three different speeds at three different monthly lease points. The only difference between them was a rubber belt. You'd ask for the upgrade, IBM would raise your lease fee, and a guy would show up to change the belt.

While some chips get binned lower due to inability to run at a certain speed or having a bad core, most are simply made to run slower at a lower price point.

What really is the alternative? Would you like the chip companies to have separate manufacturing process for each speed level, causing an overall increase in cost across the line? Just charge everyone the top cost and give them all the fastest chip?

I think its a cool thing that you can buy an inexpensive computer, pay a small fee, and have it go faster rather than buy a new computer. Why someone would work overtime to find an issue with this is preposterous...

Re:Preposterous.

[simm_s]

That is called binning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning
It is standard industry practice. Doing so saves *you* money because it gives customers the option to buy underperforming or semi-functional yields at a lower cost. It is good for the environment because it reduces manufacturing waste. Higher sellable yields improves profits for manufacturers and reduce costs for you. It is a win-win situation!

Re:Preposterous.

[Runaway1956]

You're partly right. It costs the same to manufacture a fast chip, with all features enabled, as it costs to make that slower, crippled chip.

The admission inherent in the article is, "We've been ripping you off all these years, but suddenly, we find it necessary for public relations purposes to enable the features that you've paid for!"

This is why I've not paid for an Intel CPU since the original Pentium processors. I feel that their business model is dishonest.

Re:Preposterous.

[the_humeister]

IBM has been doing this for decades. Want more processing power? Call them and they'll unlock it. Where's the uproar with IBM?

Re:Preposterous.

[kelemvor4]

Mod parent up. Intel is just using an already successful business model employed by IBM.

Re:Preposterous.

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

Right. AMD does exactly the same 'ripping off'. They speed limit for binning purposes and disable perfectly good cores and perfectly good cache to turn out lower end cpus. The only thing they dont do is give you a sanctioned upgrade path that maintains your warranty. Thats much better!

Years ago manufacturing yields werent as good and materials variability caused vendors to have to speed and function test all the products and bin according to what their capabilities indicated. These days manufacturing yields are excellent and materials variability and processing are also much better. That means you sell everyone an expensive, fast cpu or you artificially bin, the latter being what every single cpu manufacturer does. Consider also that when you're buying a cpu thats limited to 1/2 or 3/4 of its actual performance limit, its going to be a lot more reliable than a cpu thats running at 95% of its actual speed capability.

I hope you dont have a Playstation 3, because that'd really tick you off.. Those have 8 cores that are almost always all good, but they turn one off because half of the yield has one bad core, and they dedicate one core to the operating system even if its not using it! Those @%^#@$'s!!!

But it is true that every silver lining has a cloud, so keep looking for it.

Re:Preposterous.

[lgarner]

... to enable the features that you've paid for!"

Which features that were listed in the product spec when you bought the chip did you not get? I can see that as a problem along the lines of fraud. But specs that were not disclosed? You never paid for them. Since you picked that particular model, it seems you didn't even want them.

Re:Preposterous.

[the linux geek]

Unisys does something even better with their mainframe line. They monitor your CPU usage and send you a monthly invoice for the capacity used, in exchange for a much lower cost of acquisition. If you like, you can also pay full price for a non-metered mainframe unit.

Re:Preposterous.

[artor3]

Oh give it a rest. Literally every semiconductor company does the same thing. It's not done to rip you off. It's done so that they can address different market segments with the same chip. Without speed binning and wounding, the low end market simply wouldn't get served at all. No one is going to design and fab a slower CPU to sell to the low end market, when the can just take their high end CPU and disable a few features. And they can't sell their high-end CPU at a lower price point, because then their ROI would suck, and they wouldn't be able to invest in new parts.

This is equivalent to furniture outlets selling pieces with that got scratched during shipping in the clearance area. You don't buy one of those pieces at 60% off and then bitch that it has a scratch on it.

Re:Preposterous.

[Runaway1956]

Which features, exactly? I've never had to pay a premium price for virtual machine support. The only thing I've seen is underclocking - which can be reversed, if you're smart enough to visit an overclocker's forum. And, you've already point out that running an underclocked CPU adds considerable life expectancy.

I won't bitch excessively about clock speeds - but I will most certainly bitch about the missing "features" that Intel feels they should be paid extra for.

PS3? I never walked into that obvious trap. Before Sony did away with Linux support (or "otherOS") PS3 looked like a decent bargain - but that didn't last long, did it?

Re:Preposterous.

[Runaway1956]

There's really no such thing as "lower end market". That's like saying that some consumers demand automobiles that will only go 35 mph, so we've got to produce autos to meet their needs. Find me the person, or people, who actually demand a low-end CPU, and I'll show you a person, or people, who really want (if not need) a high end CPU, but can't afford to pay the price being demanded.

As has been pointed out several times, it would cost Intel nothing to enable those missing features. In fact, they would save a little bit if they didn't spend the time (manpower) to disable features! They would gain a lot of public relations, though.

Re:Preposterous.

[Anonymous Coward]

It *would* cost Intel something, as the customers who would have paid more for speed now pay less. Market segmentation sounds like "ripping people off," but the alternative is only selling chips to the the top 20% of customers who are willing to pay the most, and leaving everyone else with nothing. Lowballing products and making it up on volume and goodwill doesn't always turn a profit.

Re:Preposterous.

[maxwell demon]

If they sell CPUs which actually perform less or have faulty units then you cannot fix that with a software upgrade. To reliably allow upgrading, they must cripple perfectly functional chips.

Re:Preposterous.

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

All three of these processors include virtualization support.

So once again, what features are missing that you had to pay extra for? Are you angry that Intel lets some customers buy cheaper versions of their i3 products that dont include features like virtualization and hyperthreading, which many users have no need for or wont see much benefit from?

I think I'll take the higher performing, cooler running, lower power demand cpu's that have fully disclosed prices and features, instead of the lower performing, hotter running, higher power demand cpu's that also have fully disclosed prices and features. Railing on about things that have no applicability to this specific topic or that have no basis in reality seems unnecessary and unproductive.

But you have a nice day now.

Re:Preposterous.

[Your.Master]

No, it's like saying some consumers demand automobiles that will only go 150mph when they could go 300mph. Some people actually care about top speed. Some don't, at all. Some do, but care more about money. Welcome to the world of market segmentation.

The consumers aren't demanding a low-end CPU per se, they are demanding a cheap CPU. Others are demanding a faster CPU and are willing to pay. It's not just two groups either, it's a gradient.

It absolutely would cost Intel to enable the missing features. If their cheaper chips had the same capabilities as their high end chips, they have to cost the same amount of money, which eliminates market segmentation. Market segmentation generally benefits the company and the lowest-end consumers, while extracting more money from the highest-end consumers.

You can choose one price, equilibrium of all supply and demand, and then the people who want a high-end CPU and are willing to pay are winners because they get the same thing they wanted before, for cheaper. The people demanding the cheapest CPUs get no CPU, so they lose. There's a turning point somewhere in the middle between losers and winners.

I don't even understand why they would gain a lot in public relations. The number of people who care about this are few and this would be a one-shot. The manpower to disable the features seems pretty minimal too. Binning yields do mean that there will be a few lower-spec simply because the chip can't do better, which means that process already needs to exist.

Re:Preposterous.

[artor3]

Let me explain something to you.

No business sells a product at some fixed profit margin above the cost to manufacture. What companies do is they first determine their the lowest price they'd be willing to accept, their WTA, for a product. Due to economics of scale, the WTA goes down as the number of goods sold goes up. Imagine a graph where the x-axis is the number of units sold, and the y-axis is the lowest price they'd be willing to accept for that number of sales.

Meanwhile, they gauge what customers would be willing to pay (WTP) for the product. Obviously, the lower the price, the more people will be willing to pay. So you get another graph, where the x-axis is the number of buyers, and the y-axis is how much they're willing to pay.

It is mathematically provable that the maximum utility exists when you overlay the two graphs and set the price at the intersect point. However, this leaves some money on the table, as there are some customers whose WTP is less than the price point. You can't just lower your price, because you're already at the optimum price -- you'd lose out on all the additional money that most of your customers are willing to pay. So you have two options. You can have periodic sales, but this only gets those customers who pay close attention, and also loses money on customers with a higher WTP who happen to be lucky or thrifty. Or, you can create a product with reduced functionality and sell it at a reduced price.

You may wish with all your heart that this wasn't so. You may want companies to give away their best products at the lowest possible price, with no thought of securing funds to invest in future development. But this is how the world works. This is how prices are set. And, as I said, it is mathematically provable as the best method for everyone, consumers included. Incidentally, this system breaks down when a monopoly exists -- that's where consumers really start getting screwed, and that's what you should save your outrage for.

Re:Preposterous.

[rickb928]

If you think this is somehow wrong, you need to be kept away from your products.

It takes just as much engineering, development, and 'work' to deliver those features whether they are accessible or 'hidden'. Charging more for more functionality is not a ripoff. Making it as simple as a code or switch is more honest than forcing a de-install/re-install just to activate code that was already there, and had to be tested and compiled to ensure it worked.

What part of pay more for more is a ripoff, unless you expect more for less? Some companies so that. Your choice who you do business with or work for.

Re:Preposterous.

[steveha]

Intel has been doing that forever, from the 486SX, which just had a broken FPU

Some people here on Slashdot seem really upset about this software upgrade thing. But I was upset about the 487SX, and I still grimace when I think about it.

Before the 486, you had the 386 CPU chip, and the 387 FPU chip. A 386 motherboard would have a second socket for the FPU; probably the socket was empty when you bought a 386 system, but you could buy a 387 for a speed boost.

The 486 was the first Intel CPU with an integrated FPU. So, the 486SX was a way for Intel to sell a cheaper part, and to sell 486 chips whose FPU was defective. I get that. I'm cool with that.

The real 486 was called the "486DX". SX == no FPU, DX == FPU.

The 486SX and the 486DX were pin-compatible. If you wanted to upgrade a 486SX system, you could simply pull the 486SX out and pop in a 486DX.

But Intel tried to push a motherboard design where there were two sockets: the 486SX socket, and the 487SX socket. Instead of unplugging the 486SX and putting in a 486DX, you were supposed to leave the 486SX in place, and buy a 487SX, which was just a 486DX with an incompatible pinout (including one extra pin). You couldn't put a 487SX in a 486DX socket. When you put in a 487SX, the motherboard would disable the 486SX and it would just sit there, with the 487SX doing all the work, as it really was just a 486DX. (And an integrated FPU sharing cache with the rest of the CPU is better for performance.)

I found the whole 486SX/487SX thing to be breathtakingly obnoxious. It's one thing to provide multiple price points and find a way to sell CPUs with a defective FPU. It's quite another thing to engineer up a whole system that was cynically designed to lock up a perfectly good 486SX chip and trick a user into buying a special 487SX chip instead of just getting a 486 as an upgrade.

To make it even stupider, the 487SX cost more than a 486, because the 486 was being mass-produced. I found a Google Books scanned copy of InfoWorld that said the 487SX was 30% more expensive than an equivalent 486 chip! ($799 vs. $588 for a 25 MHz part) And a 25 MHz 486SX must have cost $258 because the cost of leaving the 486SX in place and adding a 487SX was $1057, vs. $588 for the 25 MHz 486DX plus having a spare 486SX you could sell or give away.

Nobody I knew ever bought a 487SX, and I don't think many companies even built computers with a 487SX socket. Even Intel can't push that kind of cynical "solution" and have wide success with it.

steveha

Re:Preposterous.

[thejynxed]

Actually, they had support, but Intel disabled the use of that support intentionally via CPU microcode so that only certain higher-priced models of those capable chips could actually execute the virtual mode portions.

AMD did not do that.

Re:Preposterous.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why they purposely slow it down, though. Why not just sell it as is for the lower price?

Re:Preposterous.

[mabhatter654]

because with IBM the machine is purchased under a contract with IBM. In the Desktop computing world, CPUs are a "thing" a resource in a box with a 1 year defect warranty. Intel has no "rights" to what the chip in my machine does only that I don't violate their copyright by reverse engineering it. IBM machines come with thick books guaranteeing CPU, uptimes, power consumption, etc. as well as warranties and service contracts for not meeting any of those specifications.

Intel is selling a widget that does "computer stuff", good luck with software. IBM is selling the actual service/utility the CPU provides, a system that will do so many credit card transactions per minute, 24x7.

Re:Preposterous.

[cheekyjohnson]

Well, someone that finds the idea of crippling the product (because everything is already done, including the extra features that you have to pay for) just to make them pay more later for something that's already done but locked away could find it "wrong." Or did I misunderstand something?

Your choice who you do business with or work for.

Which doesn't exempt them from criticism.

Re:Preposterous.

[backslashdot]

What is dishonest about it? There is nothing dishonest in making a profit .. as long as you are honest about the features of the product.

Second, you realize that this actually benefits the low end consumer? For one thing Intel can charge them a cost barely at the manufacturing price while charging a premium from the customers who are willing to pay for the extra power.

Re:Preposterous.

[Zancarius]

Right. AMD does exactly the same 'ripping off'. They speed limit for binning purposes and disable perfectly good cores and perfectly good cache to turn out lower end cpus. The only thing they dont do is give you a sanctioned upgrade path that maintains your warranty. Thats much better!

I don't think that's really what the OP was suggesting. Everyone here knows that AMD and Intel both do this. The difference is that AMD has made is a selling point for much longer (think Black Edition) and that part of the allure to AMD for some bands of enthusiasts has been the idea that the company makes no bones about unlocking extra cores at your own risk. Compared to Intel who has a history of permanently disabling such unlocking via microcode, I think you can see where the OP was coming from. AMD: Unlock at your own risk, Intel: haha, sorry.

Of course, that appears to be changing now.

I think the conclusion that some in this thread have made about this being proof that Intel has no real competition is somewhat false. It's true that Intel's offerings are far superior in terms of performance (not so much in terms of price), but to assume that Intel offering software unlocking is somehow a sign that no one can compete with them is absurd. AMD has been doing this for much longer, except that the unlocking capabilities fell on the shoulders of motherboard manufacturers which admittedly has created its own niche market of enthusiast hardware.

Re:Preposterous.

[rickb928]

Actually, look at it as if they don't charge you more for features you didn't want or need? If I wasn't on my phone I would expound further, but if you can't see this, I don't think more words would help.

Re:Preposterous.

[Cwix]

Yes, and your point is?

Re:Preposterous.

[cheekyjohnson]

Actually, look at it as if they don't charge you more for features you didn't want or need?

Yes, but the features were already made and there before they locked them down, correct? Some people may be against such practices (and believe that the only thing is helps do is artificially lower the price).

Re:Preposterous.

[aeoo]

Just charge everyone the top cost and give them all the fastest chip?

This sounds like a good option, or at least an option worth considering. I don't think the cost would be "top" though. It would be somewhere in the middle. I think the cheapest bargains would vanish, but so would the most excessive markups for the cutting edge.

There are two ways to look at the situation. One way to look at it is to say that bargain hunters will not buy a CPU unless it costs $200 dollars or whatever the bargain price point is at these days.

Another way to look at it is like this. Cutting edge performance enthusiasts are more than willing to pay absurd amounts of money just to be able to feel that they are at the very top of the performance heap, and to be able to brag about it online for a month or so. If that's the case, why not create a product structure to milk that money out of them, if they are so willing to part with it?

Either way we know that the CPU business is highly profitable with the tiered price structure that it uses. In other words, the bottom dollar CPUs still generate profit, or they wouldn't be sold just to please the bargain hunters, would they? So if we start charging people a fair price for what the CPU really is, without artificially crippling the CPU, I think the price would normalize somewhere in the middle instead of at the top.

Whatever big businesses are doing it's almost always for their own selfish benefit and not for the benefit of the consumer. Businesses are not charities after all. So if a business creates a tiered price structure, it does so not so that it can serve the consumer better, but to extract more money from the market.

Re:Preposterous.

[Lennie]

In this case it just means that current design and manufacutring process have very good yield.

This isn't true most of the time and when that happends they end up disabiling things that don't work on chips and sell them at lower speeds or with less cache.

It could also means AMD isn't competitive.

Re:Preposterous.

[Nimey]

The 487-25 was more expensive than a DX2-50 Overdrive in 1994, when I bought the OD. Completely pointless.

BTW, they didn't have a separate 487-only socket. My system's manual said its spare socket was for a 487, but it took the Overdrive just fine. I could have gone up to a DX4-75 if I'd wanted to, but IIRC those weren't available yet when I did the upgrade. It was not compatible with the Pentium Overdrives; there was a slightly later 486 CPU socket that was, and I'd be surprised if it took 487s.

Re:Preposterous.

[dakameleon]

The PS3's Other OS support was there for 4 years. If you'd bought it prior to the 3.21 system software version, you didn't need to upgrade if you wanted to retain that functionality. Hardly "didn't last long", if you consider it such a bargain.

(that said, the artificial limitation of the hypervisor restricting access to the GPU certainly was petty)

Re:Preposterous.

[elsurexiste]

IBM didn't sell you the computer and printer, they rented them. It's reasonable that they offered different service levels. They can do whatever they want with the hardware: is theirs and you only care about the SLA.

The itch starts when you buy the stuff. Intel sell you a Ferrari with a switch inside that's stopping it from working at full capacity, and the upgrade is just flipping it. Of course, you would want to upgrade yourself, without paying for such a minimalistic job. That's what got people angry: the metaphorical switch. It costs exactly the same to make a Ferrari and a Fiat 600. Why sell an artificially crippled product?

Re:Preposterous.

[rickb928]

Now I have a keyboard and can explain my point of view more fully.

The concept of selling software with 'hidden' features that can be quickly enabled for an additional fee really annoys a lot of people. I don't see any real problem here, but it is an interesting and misunderstood concept.

The first thing thing I would address is the use of descriptions as 'easily unlock' or 'unlock with a trivial proess', or any of the descriptions that focus on the simplicity of accessing the additional features. The ease of accessing these features (ignoring the cost, for now) has nothing to do with the effort and cost of developing and including these features in the first place. Trying to link the cost of these 'upgrades' to some notion of complexity in switching them on is pointless and naive.

Next, the complaint that these features are already built and even 'in place' in some cases, and many people complain that they should have gotten these features for the original price. Well, that speaks to marketing and sales, more than to programming or delivery. You probably would not pay $200 for a bare-bones word processor when you can spend just as much for a full suite of office productivity software (and you can get the equivalent for free, so bargain hunters are in a wonderful place right now). But if you would not pay more for less, then when you buy Windows 7 Home Basic as part of a new laptop, do you expect to get all the features of Windoes 7 Ultimate for no additional cost? Why? Because you think the additional features in Ultimate should be sold for no additional cost? Because you expect features that are not going to be used by you (many low-end laptops are not expected nor marketed to business users, and so the OS is not expected to be a business-class OS)? Well, the incremental cost of a commercial OS today is pretty damned small. You are paying for research, design, coding, and the maximum profit they thing they can get. All you Apple fanboys can now join in - it is not just Microsoft. How often has Apple enabled and disabled features in OSX or IOS? The outcry?

Intel has its reasons for this move, but the most interesting thing to me is that this seems focused on business users, and especially focused on heavily-manages systems. There are a lot of management and maintenance features that are part of this, and it almost seeems a selling point to boost i3 sales to these customers. Smart move, if so, though I bet it rolls out to i5 and i7 users also. Intel has had good management features before, so this is consistent.

This is not as simple as unlocking features - it looks like BIOS updates and pre-boot software are part of this. and it looks like your average home user will not be interested in this.

But as a concept, unlocking features is a good way to add value to software and/or hardware, and is, to me, fair if the pricing is otherwise fair. It's just a different delivery system. If you feel better buying some upgrate package, sitting through an install, well, I think you're off the mark.

Re:Preposterous.

[Whuffo]

There's an expense involved in designing the processor so it can be "feature controlled", maintaining multiple versions of the microcode and their distribution, etc.

This increases the manufacturer's cost to produce the product and you'd better believe it'll be passed on to you.

There are good arguments for "speed grades" and I'm sure some MBA figured out what produces the highest profit. But what what about competition and companies producing the best product they can? Is "good enough" OK now?

For the general public, this policy is a fail; they're paying for something that they can't fully use due to artificial limitations. For those of us who understand this stuff it's a win; I like my bottom end Core i7 which happily runs at well over the top bin speed. Intel is trying to work both ends of the street with this latest upgrade scheme and they should be ashamed of themselves.

Re:Preposterous.

[sznupi]

Speed is one thing, but Intel cars would include stuff like "engine has some fuel-efficiency features disabled, despite they being present and fully functional" (you'd think that would be an especially great thing for entry-level models; also manufacturers being responsible about environment / etc., what with how they want to appear "green") or "it could carry more people and luggage, there's already place for them (structure, seats, etc.) but it's permanently sealed off by a translucent barrier"

Of course, car analogies being overall stupid and limited as they are, it's not nearly as bad in the realm of chips, there's not actually so much waste involved.

However (and worse?) it's inconsistent, and just a small snippet in the specs (not even on the level of a translucent barrier, however hard to notice at first sight it would be; more like fuel efficiency evident only after some driving, and even then only "connoisseurs" can really see it?). Sometimes it gets outright weird.

For example, look at the low-end Intel hit (and I do mean it completely seriously, those are great) of the last 2+ years, Celeron E3000 series. Celeron Dual-Core E3400 costs a bit less than 40€ for quite some time & is apparently the least expensive Intel CPU now at retail (maybe even almost "historically"; nice deal overall - 2.6 GHz, essentially a C2D with large part of L2 disabled, down to 1 MiB, and 800 MHz FSB; imperceptible difference in daily usage - and note that I don't really mind the disabled cache)...

...plus it actually does have virtualization, Intel VT-x, for some reason (all Celerons from E3000 series do). And yet, so many "better" CPUs from Intel... don't have it. Why?

Re:Preposterous.

[Z00L00K]

Sometimes a processor works just fine at a lower clock frequency but fails at a higher, and then instead of scrapping them you can sell them cheaper and improve your income.

A software upgrade of a processor may actuallty be a changed microcode where the scheduling of some stuff is altered to improve performance. Shaving a clock cycle in a relatively common operation can do a lot for performance.

Re:Preposterous.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Thanks for elaborating on that. That's what I was alluding to, but I was posting from mobile.

Re:Preposterous.

[rickb928]

As quick look at the program indicated to me that it was focused on enterprise and managed features, and some of this is BIOS related. For me, I'm not sure this is even useful for me. I won't be too hurt.

Re:Preposterous.

[the_humeister]

Intel has no "rights" to what the chip in my machine does only that I don't violate their copyright by reverse engineering it.

You know what? Buying this chip at the rated speed and given features also doesn't change that. Go ahead and find some other way to unlock those features. What is Intel going to do to you? If anything, at least you know some of them have some overhead in overclocking potential.

Re:Preposterous.

[mabhatter654]

Ah, but "the first one is free" applies here. We geeks all know the chips physically could be faster and know tricks to get the extra juice out... Much like car geeks. But just like car gearheads are finding out, modern engines have a CHIP limiting speeds and gears. Now cars have to have DMCA CRACKS to improve performance, etc.

This is probably the first shot fom intel.. Particularly nasty because companies like Apple like to Underclock things to meet power and heat needs.

So rather than meet Apple's challenge of "stop making crap" and only marketing the BEST STUFF. Intel is clearly trying to take the desktop the WRONG way. Desktops should be very close to the same now on terms of CPU... The inventive should be to reduce the desktop as much as possible... Like the Mac Mini is a sleek appliance. USERS SHOULDN'T CARE what speed their machine is running anymore. If a software says "Made for Windows" and I have a PC with Windows it should run... Unless it is some very special application that has special device needs, NOTHING, even Crysis, should have a blip on ANY NEW COMPUTER on the shelf.

THAT is the big threat to intel right now. If a PC can't play any PC game on the shelf, and you seriously tell the public those are not the "special game computers" then why SHOULDN'T the public buy iPads? At this point an iPad has MORE features, out-of-the-box than those stupid "Windows Starter" PCs. Clearly intel continues their roadmap into oblivion.

Re:Preposterous.

[Dr_Barnowl]

Because the market will bear a higher price. But it wouldn't if faster processors were available for less money.

What, you thought the price you paid had something to do with the cost of manufacture?

Re:Preposterous.

[Walter Carver]

... to enable the features that you've paid for!"

Which features that were listed in the product spec when you bought the chip did you not get?

How about the cost that I have paid, such as polution of the enviroment during the manufacturing process.

Overclocking is bad, unless you pay us more first.

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess this means if you overclock yourself but stay within the range of the "upgrade" you are guaranteed to not cause any damage to your processor.

Tease

[Anonymous Coward]

Just teasing you with cheap prices up front, then trying to bait you into unlocking extra performance for more $$... Seems silly to me, buy what you want up front and not toy around with these 'upgrades' which just means they're intentionally gimping the processor just to tease you into paying more.

I'm sure OEMs are behind this racket though. Lowers the price upfront to make them more desirable and intel cashing in on the back end.

Wow

[discord5]

Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. [snip] This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency

Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.

It's like I'm being scammed at purchase, and scammed again at upgrade time.

In before Intel sells 256 core CPUs but requires you to purchase an extra license for every 2 cores beyond the initial 2.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

In before Intel sells 256 core CPUs but requires you to purchase an extra license for every 2 cores beyond the initial 2.

I dunno - I think IBM already has a patent on that. ;)

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't, I suspect Oracle does

Re:Wow

[DeeEff]

256 Cores? I thought that was AMD territory my friend.....

I kid I kid. Seriously though, this is some bullshit. I don't care if they have the best in the business, I don't think I'm buying another intel chipset for my home for a while...

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

why should it matter that you cannot use hw you didn't pay for? if you weren't happy with the performance/price when you bought it you should have bought something else

Re:Wow

[TubeSteak]

Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.

That's pretty much how CPUs have always been.
Intel or AMD makes a wide array of processors, but mostly, you're just buying variations on the top processor for each model.
The CPU gets tested and underperforming chips get tagged as low or mid range.
After that, production quotas and demand get filled by software/hardware locking fully functional top end chips.

Re:Wow

[Idbar]

The summary says they "offered upgrades" not that they are charging for it. And I was able to download the installer without being asked about anything. They seem to be providing a "patch", perhaps they found they could change stuff and make it work better.

But sounds awesome that you think otherwise! Because you'll never try to get it thinking it's going to cost you money!

Re:Wow

[Mr_Silver]

It's like I'm being scammed at purchase, and scammed again at upgrade time.

Out of interest, if you know that $200 will get you a certain set of specifications, you decide those are the specifications you want, you buy it on the expectation that you will get those specifications and when you put it into your computer you find that you do actually get those specifications ...

... why do you think you're being scammed at purchase?

Re:Wow

[irwiss]

Why do you think you're scammed?

Do you honestly expect an E6400 to be physically different from an E6420 except for a couple jumper slugs?

You pay X dollars for Y performance, if you want 125% Y performance you pay X+Z, simple.
The same as if you buy a game engine for a set number of developers,
or a software license for large products(e.g. windows),
or a db license(e.g. mssql).

Except now you pay for physical limitation and later on - with that business model you'll pay for software limitation,
which by the way opens the way for hacks.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that before at purchase you bought a chip of about the same price as you probably will under this scheme, relative to the faster chip. You then decided you wanted a faster chip, had to buy a chip from scratch and then take your PC to pieces, before installing a new chip and quite possibly discarding a perfectly good incumbent as trash or to sit in a cupboard.

Whereas now you would presumably simply buy a key from a web site and turn on the extra functionality. Of course where Intel would be shafting you is if they charged just as much for this key as they did for the faster chip as if you were doing a drop-in replacement. However if they were to make it some amount less than this (ideally comparable to the difference in price between the two chips at retail, or only a fraction more) how could this not be better than the status quo?

Re:Wow

[v1x]

The software download itself is free, although upon running the tool, it brings up the following message on one of the dialog screens, "During the upgrade process, you will enter the PIN number from the upgrade card you purchased," which suggests that they are charging for it. Sadly, my computer is not upgradeable by this method.

Re:Wow

[Idbar]

Thanks! Since I don't have an i3, I didn't want to even try. But I see everyone ranting about it. I don't see pricing or anything anywhere.

Re:Wow

[hedwards]

Yes, but they don't generally charge for an upgrade, and if you break it in the process of overclocking what they sold, they don't support it.

This is a new low as they're selling you a chip, a chip that they're guaranteeing will work at the higher clockspeed, but won't unlock for you unless you pay more than they were charging for the chip. This sort of shit is why I try to avoid buying Intel products whenever I can.

Re:Wow

[hedwards]

Because Intel was willing to charge say $200 for a chip that had those capabilities, but won't let you make full use of the chip without paying extra for the privilege of using the full capacity of the chip.

Intel sold you the processor for $200 and it happens to be the same chip as the one that costs say $300.

I'd say that it's a scam and that the DoJ ought to come down hard on them.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just being stupid.

Re:Wow

[jd2112]

Because Intel was willing to charge say $200 for a chip that had those capabilities, but won't let you make full use of the chip without paying extra for the privilege of using the full capacity of the chip.

Intel sold you the processor for $200 and it happens to be the same chip as the one that costs say $300.

I'd say that it's a scam and that the DoJ ought to come down hard on them.

Because Intel was willing to charge say $200 for a chip that had those capabilities, but won't let you make full use of the chip without paying extra for the privilege of using the full capacity of the chip.

Intel sold you the processor for $200 and it happens to be the same chip as the one that costs say $300.

I'd say that it's a scam and that the DoJ ought to come down hard on them.

Basically Intel is offering a supported method of overclocking here. So long as they aren't claiming that overclocking on your own is a DMCA violation or something and threaten to sue anyone that dares to overclock in an unapproved manner into oblivion I don't have a problem with it. For a system builder it would be great, you could offer several different models at different price points and would only have to stock a single CPU.

Re:Wow

[lgarner]

And you were willing to pay $200 for a chip that doesn't. Looks like everyone's happy, except the whiners who think they're entitled. Look up "scam".

Re:Wow

[maztuhblastah]

... why do you think you're being scammed at purchase?

Because:
"This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to."

(Apologies to Mr. Stephenson.)

More seriously: because the current anti-capitalist attitude that's become increasingly prevalent on the web lately basically dictates that a group selling a product that you don't approve of based on cost/marketing/etc. is inevitably "a scam". Either that, or "exploitation".

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine you're the one building the CPUs. They all come from the same wafer, and after testing they're binned according to their capabilities. If they can run at high speed and they have a large, working cache, they're "A" grade. If they can't make "A", but they do work at a lower speed/or smaller cache, they're "B" grade. Others are unusable and scrapped.

Now you charge $300 for "A" parts and $200 for "B" parts; recognizing there is a market for both. Customers who can't afford "A" will buy "B".

Now imagine your manufacturing process rocks, and all parts end up in the "A" bin. Do you sell them all for $300 and not offer anything to your $200 customers? No, you design in a way to offer "A" parts as "B" parts.

That's great so far. "A" customers are happy. "B" customers get what they pay for. But... you know... that "B" part is "A"-capable. Wouldn't it be cool to offer the "B"-part customers a paid upgrade? It'll cost you in logic design, software, ordering process, customer support, etc... but maybe enough "B" customers will, over time, raid the piggy bank for an easy CPU upgrade.

I think that sounds very cool.

Re:Wow

[artor3]

So before, you got a massive discount off the top price for buying a crippled chip. Now, you get a massive discount off the top price for buying a crippled chip, and have the option to pay the difference to uncripple it at a later date.

How exactly is this ripping you off? You get what you paid for, same as always, and now have the option to get more if you pay more.

Re:Wow

[Mr. Slippery]

The same as if you buy a game engine for a set number of developers, or a software license for large products(e.g. windows), or a db license(e.g. mssql).

You speak as if those were acceptable practices.

When you have a product that's capable of 500 units-of-performance, but has been deliberately crippled so that it's only capable of 100 units-of-performance, you have a market failure.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Simply put, the marginal cost of higher specifications is 0 if it can simply be done through software.

Can't wait for the software to be cracked though.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoohoo! Have you guys leaned nothing?
This means cheap top-notch CPUs for everyone?

1. Buy the most low-end Intel Celery 1-Stalk 0-leaves CPU on sale for $cheapbucks-mc-cheapo.
2. Download "Intel Core Upgrader 1.0.RUSSHACK.rar" via torrent.
3. Unlock all the features.
4. Have fun with your brand-new shiny Intel Core X9000XFX GTX 9001-core 4-fuckin-zettabyte-cache monster, worth not one, but two $bazillion dollars!

Re:Wow

[hedwards]

I don't buy Intel chips because they engage in this sort of scamming. They've sold you a chip for $200 and are telling you what you can and can't do with it. You've paid for a chip that can pass the QA process as a faster chip, but they're not going to let you use the full capacity that you've paid for unless you pay they're extra money.

You'd have to be a real tool to think that it's not a scam.

Re:Wow

[hedwards]

No, they're selling you a chip that can pass QA as a faster chip and then charging you money in order to use the full capacity. In the past it wasn't an issue as the processors being downclocked were typically not capable of passing QA for their full clockspeed and were subsequently marked down so that they could pass the QA at the lower clockspeed. There were some that were nonetheless capable of handling the full speed, but most would become unstable or have issues that the more stringent testing would require.

Ultimately, it's BS and just another example of Intel behaving poorly.

Re:Wow

[hedwards]

The difference is that before those chips didn't typically pass the QA for their originally intended clock speed. Now, you're paying for a chip that could have been sold at the higher clock speed, but isn't because Intel figured out that they could make you pay to use that last bit of capacity. The machine already has to have cooling and a chip that's capable of handling the higher clock speed. The only thing that's missing is Intel's OK to do so.

I'm not sure how precisely that's OK. If Intel doesn't like the consequences of selling products, then perhaps Intel should get out of the business of selling things for profit. Once one buys it, they have precisely no rights to dictate how the product is used.

Re:Wow

[eugene2k]

The thing is, now you're getting a fully functional chip, crippled intentionally, whereas before you got a chip crippled unintentionally. Also, you can get a chip that is both intentionally and unintentionally crippled. More options, yay!

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

they're != their. Try not to look like a moron next time.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those specs are not the full specs. The seller is not being completely forth coming on the matter. Knowing that you have artificially hampered speed for no other reason than a marketing gimmick puts a strain on trust.

What else is this company not telling me?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you not?

Re:Wow

[sjames]

Because clearly, the better specs were so dirt cheap to produce that they were thrown in on speculation, but locked away. Then you get charged real money for something that literally costs the manufacturer nothing.

Most people instinctively feel that to be wrong and often can't say exactly why (it may be part of the hard wired instinct that allows us to behave socially). The more rigorous answer is that in a healthy market, natural competition should have compelled the manufacturer to enable those features at the time of sale in order to be competitive at that price point.

Re:Wow

[pthreadunixman]

Because before you were purchasing a product that became your property. Now you're simply being granted a license to use their property in a limited fashion.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Old school here, you know this sounds like the IBM scam of installing extra hardware in a lot of small system builds cpu/memory cabinet and putting jumpers on the backplane pins to disable it. After giving IBM a moderately large sum of cash for the new hardware, increased maintenance fees and installation fees, a FE shows up, shutdowns the machine, pulls jumper, restarts the machine and leaves. My boss almost had a conniption over seeing that.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. [snip] This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency

Yet another reason to buy AMD.

Re:Wow

[Your.Master]

There was no false pretense. They said what it did, and it does that. This announcement doesn't make your purchase any worse. At all. Whatsoever. The guy who bought the chip yesterday has literally lost nothing. In fact, he gained an option to do something, which he can decline without any consequences and be exactly where he was the day before. You're worse off if you buy an iPod the day before Apple announces a price reduction (even one that isn't effective immediately).

Re:Wow

[lgarner]

Then you've purchased a faster chip. The fact that their products are better than they claim doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. You've still gotten every penny of value from your purchase since you knew what it could do and how much it cost. You're not entitled to any more than that, you're just whining because you have that mindset. I'll keep buying Intel, or AMD, whichever one offers the best value at the time. You'd have to be an idiot to see this as a scam. Intel, and every company, and every person, owes you what your purchase agreement states. The fact that there's more on the table that you *might* be able to use is irrelevant.

Re:Wow

[lgarner]

Exactly. A frightening number of people seem to believe that "cost" is related to "value." If something doesn't cost the manufacturer extra, then they should be required, by the government, to give it away. People will always whine about not getting the best deal that they could have, even if they've gotten exactly what they willingly paid for.

Re:Wow

[Your.Master]

This is what the market does. The marginal cost of producing a higher-quality good to a lower one is of only minor relevance to the optimal pricing strategy.

When that marginal cost is 0, near-0, or even very slightly negative, it gets people's knickers in a twist here on slashdot. But focussing on this is like micro-optimising a piece of code without profiling the entire system.

Re:Wow

[backslashdot]

Or maybe the DOJ should arrest you for trying to force Intel to make and sell you a product .. Intel is not your slave. You are making the choice to buy their products.

Re:Wow

[Delarth799]

When you buy Windows Vista or 7 Home Premium, it has the same features installed as Windows Ultimate. Yet those extra features are locked down until you purchase an upgrade. Should the DoJ investigate Microsoft as well? Lets say you bought Home Prem since that was all the features you needed at the time, later you want to move up for some extra features. Instead of buying another copy just to upgrade you can directly upgrade saving you money. If you can purchase a slower chip for some amount less than a faster chip and down the road decide you want extra power, this gives you the option to gain more power from that chip without having to replace it. Saving you time, effort, and money since now you don't have to go out and buy another $200-$300 chip just for some extra performance.

Of course as of right now it would appear that Intel is just offering you a free download to boost the CPU speed but them offering a tiered CPU upgrade path you pay for in the future wouldn't be a crazy or evil idea. It wouldn't be something something aimed at the high end computer user, this is something the average joe could take advantage of to get some extra speed out of their computer without having to replace it or take it in and spend more money to buy a whole new CPU.

Re:Wow

[imunfair]

It isn't "scamming" really, but it is greedy. Because they can clearly sell the hardware for $200 (maybe slightly higher if you average the prices across versions) - so you have two people paying drastically different prices for the same hardware. The price disparity just makes it obvious that they're pulling an Apple and ripping consumers of higher end processors off to the tune of hundreds of dollars. (Price out RAM upgrades from Apple VS Newegg if you think I'm bashing them irrationally - they make hundreds of dollars reselling PC hardware)

This is basically the same as restricting supply and having a consumer auction (which I'm surprised companies haven't tried yet), making first-adopters pay premium prices until demand dies down.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right dude.... Buy a ferrari with 4 cylinders disengaged, pay again to have something you own do what it should have done in the first place :)

Re:Wow

[Junior J. Junior III]

Or you can just write your own software that unlocks your CPU for you. Not that would ever be made illegal.

Re:Wow

[batkiwi]

I do not completely agree with Intel here, but my take on the situation is as follows:

Intel knows their market, and sees that there are 10X people willing to pay $Y, 5X people willing to pay $2Y, and 1X people willing to pay $10Y. Each of these groups of people expect to get more than the group under them, but the group under them is not willing to pay more.

Up until now, they've been "binning" chips. If a chip can't pass the speed tests to be worth $10Y, then sell it as $2Y. If it cant' pass those tests, sell it as the cheap chip.

However, what if in this line of chips ALL of the chips start passing the higher speed test? The market will not bear selling all of these chips at $10Y, so they have two options:

-permanently "bin" the chips with some sort of laser cut trace
-soft-"bin" the chips

They've chosen the second, and since they have, there's no reason not to allow people to re-upgrade them later.

Re:Wow

[petermgreen]

How practical that is will of course depend on how well designed the locking system is. If it's done properly with digitally signed unlock messages tied to the processors serial numbers it could be made extremely difficult to bypass.

Re:Wow

[gottabeme]

"them offering a tiered CPU upgrade path you pay for in the future wouldn't be a crazy or evil idea. It wouldn't be something something aimed at the high end computer user, this is something the average joe could take advantage of to get some extra speed out of their computer without having to replace it or take it in and spend more money to buy a whole new CPU."

Are you stupid, or are you an Intel lackey?

Your average joe could have had that extra CPU speed in the first place if Intel hadn't artificially crippled the CPU. It didn't cost Intel any extra money to make the CPU go faster.

It's pure greed, which is pure evil.

Re:Wow

[gottabeme]

That's not the point. The point is it's greedy of Intel to do such a thing, and greed is evil.

Also, it's almost like the political system: basically two parties, with nearly no chance for anyone else to compete. (Not talking about other markets, like mobile devices.) By doing this, Intel would be exploiting its monopolistic market position at the expense of consumers.

I'm not saying the government should regulate Intel; I'm saying Intel ought to be ashamed for doing such a thing.

Not everything that's wrong should be illegal, but everything that's wrong should not be done.

Re:Wow

[gottabeme]

So you support Intel's greed, then.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

... why do you think you're being scammed at purchase?

Because Intel is disabling pre-existing functionality, and then trying to sell it back to me.

You're correct when you point out that a well-defined product is being sold at a well-defined price. But that's not what causes the feeling of being scammed.

The feeling of being scammed comes from a knowledge that they are deliberately crippling their product in an attempt to game the marketplace.

Here, the word "scammed" was not used in the legal sense. Here, "scammed" refers to the unpleasant feeling of being a target of a cynical, manipulative pricing game. No doubt the game is legal, since I'm sure Intel pays their legal team handsomely to ensure so. But that fact doesn't make me feel any better about it.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Because clearly, the better specs were so dirt cheap to produce that they were thrown in on speculation, but locked away. Then you get charged real money for something that literally costs the manufacturer nothing.

That would be awesome news then! If it truly costs nothing, you can simply build a CPU for free in your garage. Or at least build on these extra features for free. Which ever parts you feel actually cost nothing anyway.

Put that way, you start looking into the machinery needed to make a CPU, you will probably notice it is quite expensive, not to mention the designs the company feels they should recoup costs on.

Of course then you realize how many billions of dollars of hardware are needed setup in advance before an extra feature has such a low cost, and still isn't free.

Personally I don't mind that they finally figured out they could lower the cost on an entire CPU family line by designing one chip instead of 10 different ones, and passing the cost savings of the low end chips on to me because it doesn't cost them any extra to make a run of low end chips.

Even the high end chips are still cheaper than their previous mid range chips used to be when they had 10 different models in that family, so high end computing is still over all cheaper than before, and low end computing is VERY cheaper compared to before.

Prices are going down across the entire class range of CPUs available, and your only complaint is they don't sell them at cost. I'd say its not too bad deal after all comparing prices of last year, and welcome to business :)

Re:Wow

[nurb432]

That practice is different than *planning* to give you reduced performance where the chip has been tested higher. With the intent to charge you to get full use.

Re:Wow

[cgenman]

Say that you buy a can with "12 oz" of soda inside. You open it up and drink it. Then you take a look at the can. The can actually holds 16oz. And the manufacturer actually made all 16oz of soda. But to sell a 12oz can, they put 4oz of the soda within a thick plastic resin, thus destroying it for all time. The bottom of your 12oz can is 4oz of wasted plastic graveyard devoted to market segmentation.

They sold you 12 oz of soda, and you got 12 oz of soda. But they ALSO made an extra 4oz of soda. Since you didn't pay for that extra 4oz of soda, they destroyed it rather than letting you or someone else have it.

And yes, that's how the chip industry works. That's also how the car, and certain other industries, works. From the business perspective, it is a way of segmenting your market and supporting tiered pricing options. From an end-consumer standpoint, the company lobotomized something they sold to them, because they aren't the overpaid elite. And whenever they're waiting for an install to complete, or a copy of Outlook to open, they know that bits of their lives are being wasted because a company artificially decided to make the processor in their machine suck 20% more.

It makes perfect business and engineering sense. But that's not how people feel about it. The average person isn't buying a specs sheet. They're buying the fastest processor they can afford. And as it turns out, the processor they bought could be even faster, but some company stopped it for completely artificial reasons. People are going to be frustrated by that.

Re:Wow

[Khyber]

The last known pricing scheme was $50 to unlock your processor.

Re:Wow

[Khyber]

"Do you honestly expect an E6400 to be physically different from an E6420 except for a couple jumper slugs?"

Actually, yes, because we don't use jumpers anymore. Do you even know we laser-lock chips nowdays, and have been since like, the GeForce 6 series?

Plenty of physical difference, especially in the fact half of the die is unusable due to laser-locking.

Re:Wow

[Khyber]

"Now imagine your manufacturing process rocks, and all parts end up in the "A" bin. Do you sell them all for $300 and not offer anything to your $200 customers? No, you design in a way to offer "A" parts as "B" parts."

That would be false advertising or bait and switch.

Re:Wow

[elsurexiste]

Because you know the costs, that's why. The cost for hardware X is Y, for the lowest specification level. For a greater level... it's the same cost and hardware, X and Y. The only thing that changed is the money you paid, everything else is the same. The best course of action is clearly to sell X at a reasonable price, given the cost Y, and don't sell artificially crippled hardware.

Re:Wow

[JDeane]

I wonder how long until you get the warez version for free...

Re:Wow

[mjwx]

Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. [snip] This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency

Micro(processor)transactions.

Cant wait for Intels version of DLC.

Now no-one needs to wonder why I keep buying AMD. Hyper expensive processors is what Intel offered in the late 90's when they had no competition.

Re:Wow

[mgblst]

It's like I'm being scammed at purchase, and scammed again at upgrade time.

Only if you are mentally retarded.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but now when you overclock, you're violating the DMCA.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck. I hate you people. Intel pays Ca to produce chip A. Now they give you two options: buy chip A for Pa or chip B for Pb. When you buy B, they take a chip A on one hand, a hammer on the other, hit the chip with a hammer, and give the chip to you. The cost of damaging chip A is D. So you have:
Cost of A = Ca
Cost of B = Cb = Ca + D
Sell price for A = Pa
Sell price for B = Pb
Pa > Pb
But
Ca Cb, which is bullshit because B is sold for less than A. They're cheating and would never get away with it if there was true competition - but there isn't.

If you're really thick: they are spending more money to produce an inferior product. It has no advantage whatsofuckingever, they're paying to put a smelly turd on your chip because they have absolutely no respect for you. And you know what's the worst? We'll buy it because surely enough AMD won't stay behind for long and will do the same - no competition means they make the rules and we can't do shit about it.

Re:Wow

[sjames]

Literally all of the expensive things you rattled off are irrelevant to the discussion. They covered all of those costs and more in the price of the low end chip. They covered them so well that they also threw in extra features to allow them to reversibly cripple the chip (don't worry, they passed that cost on to you as well). If they never hear from you again, they will have made a profit on the lot of it. It doesn't cost them anything to give you the magic code to enable the better specs on your CPU, but they'll sure charge you for it.

Absolutely nothing in what you said counters the point that a healthy market would mean they couldn't afford build in a crippler and remain competitive.

Re:Wow

[exomondo]

The difference is that before those chips didn't typically pass the QA for their originally intended clock speed.

So you're buying a lower-end chip that is better quality than it was before. They've bettered their manufacturing process but aren't passing the cost savings on, annoying but they aren't exactly obliged to do it.

Once one buys it, they have precisely no rights to dictate how the product is used.

I didn't see them attempting to do that anywhere. You bought it, you can do whatever you want with it.

Re:Wow

[CProgrammer98]

What utter rubbish. Just think for 2 minutes.

Firstly... "Once one buys it, they have precisely no rights to dictate how the product is used"
So if you buy a hunting rifle, it's perfectly ok for you to go and kill citizens on the streets? Or buy a car and drink a bottle of whiskey and go out for a drive? The "I own it I can do what I want with it" attitude is bullshit.

Secondly ". Now, you're paying for a chip that could have been sold at the higher clock speed" But you paid the price for the lower speed, not the higher speed.

The difference is that Intel are making ONE version instead of several, you pay for the performance you want. It's irrelevant if the chip CAN go faster, if you wanted/could afford the faster chip you would buy it. Manufacturing one version that can run at several speeds and is sold at different price points is no different to ylu that consumer than manufacturing several versions that can only run at one specific speed. You are stll getting exactly the performance you paid for - perhaps at an even cheaper price as the manufacturer gets the benefit of reduced prooduction costs.

Later if you decide the chip is too slow you can just pay an upgrade fee and have the better chip, ehich would be cheaper than replacing the chip.

You actually win ion this deal as upgrade cosst are cheaper. The manufacturer also wins due to cheaper p[roduction costs.

Re:Wow

[makomk]

If there was functioning competition in the CPU market, that would very much force them to pass the cost savings on. This is a pretty clear sign that the market isn't working.

Re:Wow

[makomk]

Cost should be related to value, though. We know that Intel could afford to sell processors running at the faster speed for $200 and make a worthwhile profit, because they did actually sell processors capable of running at that speed for that price. If the free market worked as well as its proponents claimed the rational choice for Intel would be to sell processors running at that faster speed; if they didn't someone else would make more efficient processors and crush them. (Of course, this doesn't happen because there are massive barriers to entry.)

Intel's tactics are also inefficent from an economics perspective: they're taking resources that could be used to produce a good with higher utility (the faster, uncrippled processor) and instead using them to produce one with strictly lower utility (the same processor crippled to a lower speed).

Re:Wow

[zippthorne]

Those aren't crippled chips, though. Those are chips that, according to the manufacturer's QC, won't work at the speed of the top chip, or have a bad transistor in one of the on-chip memory arrays. In the past, the bad bits were designed to be able to be disabled by fusing a connection, and it would have been a bad idea to try to access them anyway.

Those chips cannot perform at the level of the top chip. They might be able to be over clocked, at some risk of overheating and/or data loss, but for the most part, they were a best effort on the part of the manufacturers. They salvaged their yield by mitigating faults, and you got to save money by not buying a "perfect" chip.

It sounds like the yields are now exceeding consumer demand, so to keep the market segmented, intel is now disabling perfectly good chips, rather than moving on to harder-to-make, more powerful chips. I'd be surprised if their target audience, mid-sized businesses according to the article, didn't have at least one member who realizes this and sues...

Re:Wow

[Targon]

No, this is more like buying a car that has been intentionally sold with a governor to limit your speed to 60 miles per hour, and if you pay them, they replace that 60mph governor with a 70mph governor, which may not even let you use the car to its full potential. That is very different from selling a car that has been tuned to a given speed, but that you yourself can tweak or do a chip reprogram to get better performance out of, with the idea that the manufacturer will not guarantee anything beyond the initial settings.

I prefer the AMD method, make the system so you can just drop a new CPU in, without needing to replace the whole motherboard whenver a new generation comes out that uses the same socket. Socket 939 went a LONG way, going from single-core to dual core, and Socket AM2, AM2+, AM3, and AM3+ really allows consumers to keep their motherboards for a far longer time than Intel allows.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty much how CPUs have always been.

If I recall my history correctly, that's pretty much how computers have always been. For example, you would buy an entry-level IBM Foo that shipped with four Bars. It's a roaring success in your business and before you know it you want to upgrade to the mid-range IBM Foo with eight Bars. Rather than have to go through all the hassle of physically removing your existing Foo and replacing it with a shiny new Foo, you ring up IBM and (after the cheque is cleared) they send out a tech with a key and a code. The tech uses the key to unlock a panel cover and types in the code on the exposed keypad and hey presto, four more of the Bars that were already built into the Foo spring to life! Better still, you can keep expanding your Bar capacity this way as every IBM Foo is actually built with sixteen Bars (it's just the Enterprise-Grade Foo that has all sixteen already enabled).

So, as is so often the case in computers, all that is old is new again. Move along, nothing to see here...

Re:Wow

[Targon]

Bad example, and it is NOT the way the chip industry works.

Normally, you have different product tiers with different abilities, such as cache size. This means that a middle tier product does NOT have all the extra cache memory(which would add to manufacturing cost). Within that tier then, you have the QA issue, start at the top speed, and if it fails, clock it down and test again. You then have different "bins" based on how high it was able to be clocked. Now, there is a certain amount that are EXPECTED to fail at the top speed, but will work fine at a lower speed, so you get it so the high end are tested to run properly at that speed, and going down in speed, the QA process specifies how fast the chip has been "certified" to run at.

Of course, as the manufacturing process improves, fewer and fewer chips fail to QA at the highest speed, but the company has committed to selling slower speed chips. So you find chips that HAVE been QAed to the highest speed being used in those lower-speed chips. This is where people love overclocking, and historically, chip manufacturers accept making lower profits on these "good" chips that have been clocked down. Intel now wants to make money on the chips that have been clocked down for this reason.

The real question that should be questionable is why cache memory can be unlocked via software, and that is something I find more questionable. Or, how about more of an encouragement for CPU upgrades on a consumer level, where new socket designs would make it easier to swap a CPU, rather than having OEMs leaving big question marks about what CPUs a will work in a given machine?

Re:Wow

[bloodhawk]

That is simply not true, it is has been a long long time since production issues have been bad enough that QA is the main reason for downclocking a chip, the vast majority of chips sold for some time have their speeds artifically crippled as people are simply not willing to pay the premium prices and it is far cheaper to production a limited number of identical chips rather than different chips for each speed. Not to mention this isn't even a new practise, Mainframes have worked this way for decades, you buy a box and an upgrade is simply a key (sometimes litterally a key that they insert and turn to increase number of Cores/Memory).

Re:Wow

[AmiMoJo]

soft-"bin" the chips

ATI and nVidia tried that years ago. People discovered that they could flash the ROM on their graphics card to enable the software disabled parts. In some cases the parts really had failed and the result was corrupted graphics, but often as not there were either no problems or slight flaws that could be corrected by underclocking a few %. Adding an additional texture unit for 5% lower clock speed was well worth it.

I imagine Intel will have used some cryptography to prevent this. The CPU will contain a key that only Intel can process into one that unlocks the upgrade, at least until someone finds a flaw in their implementation.

Presumably overclocking will also be locked out completely.

Re:Wow

[AmiMoJo]

In practice I don't think it will be Intel offering the upgrades, it will be the OEMs like Dell and HP. It is easier for them to ship 500,000 identical PCs and just include an upgrade voucher at the point of sale. Rather than having to stock a range of models the shop can carry just one and some upgrade packs.

Of course the customer will be able to get a similar speed boost for free by simply uninstalling McAfee/Norton and some of the other crapware.

Re:Wow

[SRChiP]

And how long until CPU's have a built-in backup firmware (similar to a dual-bios system)?

Re:Wow

[foobsr]

Nice example(s) of how marketing rules the world and owns you (while you (the customer) lets it happen).

CC.

Re:Wow

[bws111]

We know that Intel could afford to sell processors running at the faster speed for $200 and make a worthwhile profit

No, we don't know that. We know that by selling a combination of processors, with some at $200 and some at $300, they can make a worthwhile profit. Let's say for every $300 chip they sell they sell 3 at $200. That makes for an average chip price of $225. The question is: would people who don't need a fast chip pay $225? Intel thinks they would not. After all, people don't like paying for things they don't need, leaving an opportunity for someone else to come in and make cheaper chips that meet their needs. So that means they must further raise the price of the chips to make up for the lost sales, leading to still more people who would not buy the chip, and so on. Pretty soon you are selling the chips to only people who demand high performance, for a price greater than $300.

And it makes perfect sense economically. It would cost way more to have two different designs and two separate production lines, raising the price of both low-end and high-end chips.

Re:Wow

[Syberz]

Because buying a Ferrari for a third of the price but having the rpm, speed, coldness of the A/C, choice of radio stations, number of airbags, torque and bhp limited because of software doesn't feel "right".

Sure you can buy a 187 500$ upgrade that unlocks all of these things or pay 250 000$ at the start and have access to everything from the get go, but it still feels like a shaft. When you're at a red light with the exact same car next to you and the other dude zooms off at 0-60 in 4 secs while you do it in 40 secs, it sucks even if you did get what you paid for.

Re:Wow

[bws111]

This is the result of a healthy market. If there was not a healthy market there would be no reason for a $200 version of the chip, just the highest price. Selling chips like this actually keeps prices down at both the low and high ends, some people are just unable to see it.

Chips have huge fixed costs - chip design and fabs are expensive. The more units you can make, the smaller the portion of the fixed costs each unit must carry. Let's say by using this pricing method they can sell 3 $200 chips for every $300 chip they sell. Let's also say that at those volumes, $100 of each chip goes towards the fixed costs. So now we have an average income per chip of $225. So I suppose your theory is that that is what they should do - one price of $225, only fast chips.

But, there is competition. many people put a higher priority on price than on performance. So if a competitor is selling a lower performance chip for $200, they will buy that one. So now, instead of selling 4 chips, they only can sell 3. The fixed cost per chip just went up to $133, raising the chip price to $258. Even fewer people will buy at that price, so your fixed cost per chip just went even higher. Before long, only people who absolutely must have high performance are buying the chips (the same ones who are paying $300 now). But guess what - instead of a $100 per chip fixed cost, they must now bear the fixed costs of those other lost sales, so their fixed cost is $400 per chip - for a chip price of at least $500.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

yup they act like an heroin pusher , this is cheap cheap cheap , specially considering their "sample" is not that good

Re:Wow

[sjames]

In a healthy market, competition will force the retail price to approach the marginal cost of production. They shouldn't be ABLE to sell the fast chip for over $225 in your example because they'd be laughed out of the market if they did. That's the point of competition in a healthy market.

Re:Wow

[bws111]

Complete bullshit. What magic is a competitor going to use to get the price that low? The only way Intel could sell for that price is to get enough people who don't care about performance to pay for something they don't want. So let's say you have a competitor who is willing to sell for $225 - Intel can chop them off at the knees by offering a lower performance chip for $200 (you know, healthy market and all that). The competitor just lost all those customers, and their $225 dollar chip now costs $500, while Intel's top end chip costs $300, just like the example above. Unless you are claiming that Intel is making excessive profit on the whole product line (not demonstrated), a competitor is going to face the same pressures.

Re:Wow

[sjames]

The same magic Intel used that allowed them to produce the chips at that cost? Consider a course in logic.

Re:Wow

[bws111]

Holy crap! You really don't understand the issue, do you? First off, the majority of the cost of a chip is in design and fab setup, not raw materials and manufacturing labor. So your 'marginal cost' theory goes right out the window. The only way a chip manufacturer can approach marginal cost is by selling such a huge volume of chips that the design cost per chip is very small.

Lets assume Intel and your competitor have similar design and manufacturing costs and similar profit margin, and in very high volumes that works out to about $225/chip on average.

Intel gets the volumes up by offering lower performance chips at less than the optimal price of $225/chip, and fewer high performance chips above that point.

What is your super-hero one-price-fits-all competitor going to do? Offer the chip for $225? Three-quarters of Intel's volume comes from $200 chips. Why is someone going to buy your $225 chip when they can get what they need from Intel for $200? So you just lost 3/4 of your volume, and now your optimal price per chip just jumped to $500, and you have lost all of your customers, because Intel's most expensive option is only $300.

Or, is your competitor going to beat Intel's lowest price of $200? That is substantially below the optimum point, so they won't be in business very long.

Re:Wow

[shutdown -p now]

You forgot the obvious third option: sell it for whatever it's really worth plus some reasonable markup. You know, just like we have been doing with physical goods for pretty much forever.

Re:Wow

[shutdown -p now]

Because it is wasteful.

Suppose I'm selling bread, but I only bake loaves of a single size. If you want to buy a loaf, it's expensive. If you pay half the price, I still give you the whole loaf, but spoil one half of it first. Is it legal? Yes, absolutely, it's my bread, I'm free to do as I see fit with it. Still, any reasonable non-sociopathic person would deem such business model as me being a dick - and rightly so.

Re:Wow

[sjames]

Look in a mirror PLEASE.

It's very simple really. Intel is non-uniquely capable of making a chip with X functionality and selling it profitably at A dollars. However, first they effectively whack it with a hammer so that it can only provide 3/4X. They charge an extra fee to un-whack it. It would cost even less to make if they skipped the whole whacking process in the first place.

If Intel is capable of that, in a healthy market, so is AMD and ABC corp and XYZ corp and several others. Each will consistantly try to undersell the other by just a bit until they can't afford to go any lower and remain profitable (naturally they must remain profitable or they'd exit the market). At that point, someone would inevitably just not whack the CPU quite as hard with the hammer so they provide just a bit more at the same price point. That will continue until the product is fully commoditised and nobody is whacking it with a hammer at all.

That is an inevitable and highly desirable trait in any healthy market.

Inevitable car analogy, you're looking at new cars and ask how much, salesman says $40K. You say that's too expensive so he offers to key the paintjob, rip the seats up and sell it to you for $35K. Sound good?

Re:Wow

[bws111]

My mistake - I thought we were discussing the real world, and not some fantasy land where all chip development stops so we can have 'commoditisation'. When would you have preferred we reached this highly desirable state? 8085? 486? Pentium II?

As to your analogy - if I didn't need seats or a paintjob (ie I am going to customize the vehicle), yes, it sounds like a good deal. A more realistic scenario would be disabling the nav system and saving me $1500 - sounds great to me. Similarly, if I have no need for a high-performance chip, I see no need to pay for performance I am not going to use. If you can disable some of that performance and give me a break on the price I see nothing wrong with that at all.

Re:Wow

[Yamioni]

What utter rubbish. Just think for 2 minutes.

Firstly... "Once one buys it, they have precisely no rights to dictate how the product is used" So if you buy a hunting rifle, it's perfectly ok for you to go and kill citizens on the streets? Or buy a car and drink a bottle of whiskey and go out for a drive? The "I own it I can do what I want with it" attitude is bullshit.

Your analogy is poorly thought out. The company that sold me the gun has no fucking right to tell me not to shoot people with it. The company that sold me the car has no fucking right to tell me not to operate it drunk. The government, on the other hand, that group that makes the laws you and I follow? They get every right to tell me what to not do with that shiny new Glock I bought to match my new Charcoal Black Hummer. Glock and Hummer can't say shit about me driving around wasted performing drive-bys on every pedestrian I see. The government is allowed to pull me over and arrest me with all due force. Glock and Hummer can piss up a rope.

Understand?

Re:Wow

[Yamioni]

Not long. Unless Intel plans on downloading additional arbitrary code to perform the unlock once the PIN is verified, crackers already have all the code necessary to perform the unlock. Even then, it only takes one cracker upgrading legit to get their hands on the unlocking code. Try as they might to obfuscate the code, it will be found and released. And given the popularity of a crack such as this, you can very well guarantee it won't take long to see.

Re:Wow

[JDeane]

I know I am looking forward to this, I usually buy 1 or 2 tiers down from the extreme editions or what ever they are being called, with this tech I will probably buy what ever is cheapest and can be turned into the top model.

Re:Wow

[HappyPsycho]

Your 2nd point can stand (I actually agree with it, as well as your conclusion) but your 1st cannot.

If someone buys a gun / car / cement truck / mace / baseball bat / etc and damages other human beings with it by intentionally misusing it although they may have whatever license / training (if applicable) to use it how is the seller at fault? Unless the buyer can prove the car's brakes weren't working or the baseball bat had a crack that caused the top to break off and hit that old lady in the head at the time of sale then the seller can't be held accountable, they are also freed of any need to honor the warranty (if applicable) in exchange for the rights to use the item as the buyer pleases.

The "I own it I can do what I want with it" attitude is the basis of every modding / hacker / fair use community in existence, a company can't always know what the user will decide to do with the product which is why they are protected if the user misuses / heavily modifies the product.

To use your two examples, if the cops pull you over for drunk driving was it because Chevy or Nissan put out a APB for your arrest for misusing their product? If you shoot someone can Colt be sued for selling you the gun even though you have a valid firearms license? That is the realm of regulation of something that is considered dangerous to society, the individual dealers can be sued for not checking your papers thoroughly but the manufacturer cannot.

Even where there is no regulation of the product the seller can't be legally challenged, I'd pay to get front row seats for the lawsuit against IKEA for selling knives to someone who went on a rampage and murdered a couple people, or the some average joe who sold their house to someone who ended up setting up a brothel.

Re:Wow

[reasterling]

mod points, mod points, my kingdom for mod points.

Re:Wow

[sjames]

I would presume that each player would be hard at work on the next generation of product hoping to jump ahead of the curve and de-commoditise their product. It's meant to be a never ending race.

I am saying that if they can afford to whack it with a hammer and sell it to you for $1500 less, they can equally well afford to NOT whack it with a hammer and sell it to you for $1500 less. If the market was healthy, that's exactly what they would be forced to do to stay in the market at all.

In fact, by not spending the money on the whacking process, they can afford to sell it to you for $1505 less.

Re:Wow

[bws111]

OK, look at it this way. Let's say Intel has turned into a charity, and will sell all of their chips for cost - no profit at all. The price of a commodity chip pretty much has zero design costs in it (it is approaching the marginal cost), right? So, if you want a commodity chip (no new features or performance), Intel will sell you one. It costs $200, which is the marginal cost. However, if you want a non-commodity chip (new features and/or performance), it will cost you the marginal cost, plus your share of the development of the non-commodity features you want. That is going to be substantially more than the commodity price.

You can't say that just because they sell some chips at a commodity price they can sell all of the chips at that price, because then the development of the non-commodity features is not paid for, and the product is an enormous loss.

So what are the options? Well, they could put a single price on the new chip, which would be higher than the commodity price but lower than the high-end price is now. If there were no competitors this would be a viable option. But there are competitors, so all the customers who only need a commodity chip will flee to a vendor who is offering a better (commodity) price. That will cause the price of the non-commodity chips to rise to exactly where they are now, because the design cost is spread across the same number of customers that it is now.

Or, they could manufacture two different chips - a commodity chip and the non-commodity chip. The non-commodity chip would have the same development costs as it does now (maybe a little cheaper because the could remove the crippling capability). On the other hand, making two chips is not as efficient, so the cost rises some because of that, and the cost of the non-commodity chip will be right where it is now.

As long as development is going on someone is going to have to pay for that development. As long as there are competitors in the commodity space that someone is the user who needs the non-commodity stuff. And any competitors in the non-commodity space will have the same development costs to be paid, so the existence of competitors is not going to magically drive the cost of new stuff down.

Vote with your wallet

[TheReaperD]

This reaffirms my decision to never by Intel.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[AnujMore]

s/by/buy

Re:Vote with your wallet

[KiloByte]

Have you looked at the power-to-price curve of AMD and Intel? AMD beats Intel so thoroughly on the performance/price curve that I wonder why anyone bothers with Intel. The only part where Intel wins is the performance of high-end CPUs, but that's only because they pack more effective cores into one unit. Performance of single-threaded programs is roughly equal, so Intel can't claim an edge there as well.

You can care about performance of either single-threaded or multi-threaded programs. In the former case, AMD wins thanks to lower price, in the latter, it still wins as you can pile more CPUs and still get it cheaper. The only case when choosing Intel might be a rational choice is the sudden jump between prices of 1-CPU and 2-CPU systems if your needs are just above the top performance of best AMDs but below the point Intel would need two CPUs as well.

Intel's advertising tries to compare CPUs with different prices. To get a meaningful comparison, you need to compare performance with a fixed price or prices with a fixed performance.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[TheReaperD]

*Sigh* It was supposed to be buy. Too little sleep and too much reliance on spell checkers. And yes, I know that last sentence is not grammatically correct. I'm just too tired to care.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[Delarth799]

Yet you buy Windows which has the same scheme. You buy Home Premium and down the line you want more features, instead of having to buy and install a new version, you just pay a small amount and unlock features that are already there.

This isn't being aimed at the high end computer user, this is for the average joe who can buy a computer and then when he wants more speed down the line can pay a small price, probably the gap between X and Y + a little extra, and get some more power without having to buy a new computer or take it in, buy a new CPU and have someone install it.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing for you that Intel came up with these new options for their customers, otherwise you might have to hunt even harder for proof to confirm your prejudice against the company.
 
I guess this means that you are of the fanboi species "AMD rules, Intel drools". So, Pepsi is great, and Coke sucks? Ford is awesome and Chevy's are for gaywads?
 
I'm also guessing you're not an Apple fanboi, otherwise you couldn't avoid Intel.
 
By all means, never "by" Intel.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[TheLink]

Uh, if AMD CPUs were really that great, Intel wouldn't be able to sell crippled CPUs like this. This is like Intel slowing down on the race track just to keep AMD in the rear view mirror. Maybe even doing some "donuts" ;).

AMD's performance price curve is the way it is because AMD has to cut their prices so much to sell their inferior chips.

My guess is Intel's CPUs have got to the stage where their crappiest batch of desktop chips is inherently as fast or even faster than AMDs fastest desktop stuff, so at the low end Intel have to cripple lots of CPUs. And some bright spark says hey we've got lots of spare resources (AMD isn't making them break a sweat) why don't we do _this_ instead.

If Intel thought AMD had a chance of pulling something much faster out of the bag, they wouldn't bother with this. But it sure looks like AMD has nothing - I don't see anything AMD has in the horizon that would overtake Intel's stuff.

So when AMD releases their next generation, even if AMD charges lower, Intel can cut the upgrade fee (if necessary). Then the customer's old slow Intel CPU, suddenly runs as fast as some of AMD's new desktop CPUs (or maybe faster than all of them). No need to ship anything except a license key/code.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[voidphoenix]

Have you looked at the power-to-price curve of AMD and Intel? AMD beats Intel so thoroughly on the performance/price curve that I wonder why anyone bothers with Intel. The only part where Intel wins is the performance of high-end CPUs,...

Intel wins on performance vs energy consumption. If one factors in operating costs, Intel wins on cost in the medium to long term.

...but that's only because they pack more effective cores into one unit. Performance of single-threaded programs is roughly equal,...

If Intel cores are "more effective", how can single-thread performance be "roughly equal"? On the contrary, the benchmarks I've seen indicate that Intel procs obliterate AMDs on a per-core-clock-cycle basis. For an AMD system to match an Intel system on performance, particularly one based on second gen Core i procs, it needs more cores (which may still cost less) and use more power (which will definitely cost more).

Re:Vote with your wallet

[PhrstBrn]

You know, people keep saying this, and I just don't see how this is the case. Factor this over the cost of the whole machine, and AMD ends up coming out behind.

AMD offering 80% the power for 50% the cost on the CPU, with the CPU is only a small portion of the system's cost, can suddenly turn into 80% of the performance for 90% of the cost. If you're just buying processors, sure, but people buy systems not processors. In the server market, people generally buy a system, put it into production, and run it until it gets retired. At most, add some RAM later in the lifecycle. Cost/Performance on the system is really the factor you should be looking at, and I just don't see AMD having a good value proposition for anything other than the Walmart special.

For years prior, AMD had the price/performance on their side, but now I really don't see this being the case.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[spire3661]

THe biggest problem with AMD is their processor marketing SUCKS. I have NO idea where to begin figuring out what models do what. The Core line is easy as hell to look at the features and know what you are getting. I dont have time to study AMD to figure out what are the current models. I was a HUGE AMD in the past, had K5, K6, Athlons loved them back then. BUt now they are a confusing mess.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[Deaddy]

I'd agree, however Intel really seems to win when you consider power consumption, at least in the latest generations. A i7 desktop can be built almost fanless, since in daily use except for some broken javascript pages you'll never hit 100% cpu for a prolonged timespan and the idle consumption is really low. I'd rather pay much more for less noise (and over the long run lower electricity cost, but that's secondary for me). And it's still cheapter than a water cooling solution.

However, being an AMD-Fanboy, I just wait until they ship the next low power cpu to replace my 5050e. ;)

Re:Vote with your wallet

[KiloByte]

HyperThreading. One core can handle two threads at nearly full speed (only certain instructions need the entire core and stall the other thread). This has an effect of doubling the number of cores, at the cost of running individual threads somewhat slower.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[Lehk228]

i don't know about you, but i would consider maxing out on web pages to be a pretty crappy CPU

Re:Vote with your wallet

[nprz]

At the time of purchase, AMD's 8-core processor cost more than Intels 4-core w/ HT, so Intel was the better deal for me. Also Intel performs better with virtualization and that was one of the selling points for me.
I think the energy usage was lower as well for Intel.

I have a dual proc quad core AMD at work though and it does its function fine there.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[im_thatoneguy]

Have you ever specc'ed out a multi-CPU system?

There is a huge price jump from paying maybe an extra $150 on a CPU and having to buy a $1k motherboard in order to use that extra inexpensive CPU.

We're actually trying to decide how we're going to build our future render farms since it almost makes sense to just build a huge hero machine with 4 decacore CPU machines than to build out 10 quad core machines after software licensing, network infrastructure etc.

So it can go either way but there are absolute limits on sockets for motherboards. Not many companies make more than 4 CPU sockets so while we could build out a similar spec'ed AMD machine with 6 CPUs instead of 4 for the same price in CPUs... where would we find the motherboard?

Re:Vote with your wallet

[toddestan]

If anything is confusing, it's Intel. The Core series has gone through about 3 sockets in the past 2 years. Just looking at the model numbers you have no idea what you're getting. You've got Core i5's with 4 cores, i7's with 2 cores, and so on. Some have Hyperthreading enabled, and some don't. Intel also likes to arbitrary remove features from their lower-end CPUs for no good reason either (well, market segmentation). And if you're going to compare with AMD you also have to drag in the confusing mess that is Intel's "Pentium" budget line.

On the other hand, AMD has stuck with Socket AM3 for quite a while, they only have three lines (and you can probably ignore the ultra-low end Sempron leaving you with the Phenom and Athlon), and they tell you the number of cores right in the model name. You also don't have to worry that AMD has removed features like VT from their lower end chips because they don't do that.

Re:Vote with your wallet

[makomk]

Last time I looked, factoring in the whole cost of the system actually made Intel look worse. Intel motherboards are generally quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones...

Re:Vote with your wallet

[PhrstBrn]

Last time I looked, factoring in the whole cost of the system actually made Intel look worse. Intel motherboards are generally quite a bit more expensive than AMD ones...

I just looked on Newegg to get a price comparasion. Picked AM3 boards vs LGA1155 (both are most popular), picked MSI as the manufacturer to get the closest apples to apples comparison. The difference between the cheapest AMD board and the cheapest Intel board (for desktops) was $10, and $50 for the most expensive. $10 is going to be significant difference with your Walmart special, however, it's not going to make a difference targeting higher end systems. Neither is $50.

Put it this way. If you're going to spend $200 more total to buy the Intel system. Your AMD processor was $200, your Intel was $350, your Intel motherboard cost $50 more. Add all the components (RAM, disks) and say your total system cost came to $2000. Your AMD system would come to $1800. If your Intel system gets more than 10% better performance for the same money, it comes out ahead on the price/performance, even though their processor itself cost 75% more.

AMD still wins on the low-end, since even a $50 split on a $400-450 system is significant.

Sandy Bridge

[mehrotra.akash]

With them making Sandy Bridge non overclockable unless you pay extra, this was very likely to happen

Re:Sandy Bridge

[Anonymous Coward]

You act as though multiplier locks, etc. are something new? I'd say selling the CPU in an unlocked edition is the new school, e.g. AMD Black, i7-K.

Re:Sandy Bridge

[mehrotra.akash]

AFAIK the c2d series and the i3/5/7 xxx series came w/o multiplier locks

I dont really know anything before that

Re:Sandy Bridge

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this compares to Sandy Bridge in any way. A large majority of people don't overclock their computer so would never use the features of the K series. This would be especially useful in computers like dell or gateway where the motherboard doesn't allow overclocking. People who build their own systems can make the choice for themselves if they want the K series or not. I don't really think that if you are building your own rig an extra $10 or $15 will break the bank, but saving that much might come in handy when buying a cheap pre-built.

Re:Sandy Bridge

[xMrFishx]

Only the extreme series had the unlocked multiplier, the rest had it locked iirc.

Re:Sandy Bridge

[lowlymarine]

To be blunt: You are wrong. Only the "Extreme Edition" and later, K-series chips in the Conroe and Nehalem lines had unlocked multipliers. Similarly, AMD only provides unlocked multipliers on Black Edition and FX-series chips. This has been true at least since the Pentium II/K6-2 line.

The BCLCK is unlocked on Conroe/Nehalem allowing overclocking that way, but it's locked on Sandy Bridge because the processor now provides the clock generator for the whole system. As sort of an "olive branch" to enthusiasts, Intel actually has "limited unlocked" multipliers on their non-K-series SB chips, allowing overclocking by up to 4 bins above the standard Turbo frequencies.

pay for overclock? i say no

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is willing to pay for permission to overclock?
Buying that cr*p, only validates that bussiness scheme, so popular in the mainframe.
Pay for more frequency, always connected to play your own game, what's coming next ?, paying a fee
to enter your own house?

Re:pay for overclock? i say no

[Anne Thwacks]

This is not a new idea ... Ros Perot got rich by licencing CPUs by the second.

Tied to the motherboard?

[laffer1]

According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip. It must store the information in the BIOS or at least use an identifier from the BIOS.

It also says you must be running certain versions of Windows 7 to install the upgrade but does not mention if an upgraded system would work in Linux or BSD or any other OS after installation.

I'm interested in a crack for this not to cheat intel out of money, but to activate it from BSD or Linux and to "fix" it myself if I have to swap out motherboards.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[couchslug]

"According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip. It must store the information in the BIOS or at least use an identifier from the BIOS."

Sounds like changing the SLIC to work with OEM Windows 7 install media. I'm sure solutions will pop up in various places...

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/index.php

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Pseudonym Authority]

I'm also interested in a crack, but only to cheat Intel out of money.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Microlith]

Virtually all instances of this program are tied to vendors you see commonly in Best Buy and the like. Mostly it is targeted at people who wouldn't dare overclock themselves or run non-Windows systems.

I imagine that by virtue of installing Linux on any of the systems in question, or dabbling with various overclocking tools, you could trivially enable the "features" being sold here. It makes sense, especially if it's tied to the motherboard.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[AngryDeuce]

I honestly don't even give a damn about the money, I am interested just because fuck Intel, fuck them in their stupid asses.

I find I am becoming more and more militant when it comes to bogus moneymaking schemes these tech companies create by eliminating preexisting functionality and charging you extra to give it back to you. Either I'm getting old, or I've been following these trends too closely. Maybe it's time to take up sports fanaticism, or whittling?

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[WrongSizeGlass]

According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip. It must store the information in the BIOS or at least use an identifier from the BIOS.

They're probably grabbing a unique identifier from the motherboard or BIOS/EFI and storing it in non-volitale RAM on the chip. When you run the 'upgrade' it probably just updates the bits for the clock multiplier. By storing a unique (and probably encrypted) value tied to the board it will make it harder for someone to figure come up with a crack.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[xMrFishx]

make it harder for someone to figure come up with a crack.

...and like Sony found out, "impossible" does not in fact mean that.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and like Sony found out, "impossible" does not in fact mean that.

Of course it is not impossible. If Intel is doing it via software then so can someone else.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[PPH]

it will make it harder for someone to figure come up with a crack.

Oh boy! They've throw down the gauntlet.

Game on!

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Sepodati]

You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor. You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor. Just because a $400 functionality processor came out of the chute, you expect them to give it to you for $200? Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available? Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version, thus making your $200 model more expensive?

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[snemarch]

This is a very small attack surface, though, and if it's protected with a per-CPU unique ID and asymmetric encryption it could very well be 'uncrackable' unless the private key is leaked.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[elashish14]

But even if you buy Intel, install a cracked upgrade and don't pay them any money, you're STILL endorsing the practice by using their chips in the first place. If you really want to stick it to them, then you'll stop buying and supporting their products altogether.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[AngryDeuce]

I'd like it if a product's cost was tied to the cost of production plus a reasonable profit margin, you know, something tangible.

By admitting that it costs them exactly the same to make the $200 processor as it does the $400 one (as it must, since they're serving up the exact same product in both cases), they're eliminating any justification for that price at all.

You go ahead and pay whatever arbitrary price they see fit for a product if you want. Me, if I'm buying something, that is now mine, and I'll do with it as I see fit. If that includes hacking the clock speed or the multiplier to unlock capabilities the manufacturer didn't see fit to allow me to use out of the box, c'est la vie. It's my processor now, not theirs, and I can (and will) do what I want with it. They can fight this, or they can stop under-clocking processors and sell people a CPU that's price has some basis in reality and not some arbitrary figure.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Arlet]

By admitting that it costs them exactly the same to make the $200 processor as it does the $400 one (as it must, since they're serving up the exact same product in both cases)

You only count the raw manufacturing cost of turning a lump of silicon in a working CPU.

This is silly. Most of the cost will be in the design and testing efforts, which are probably higher for the $400 version than for the $200 version, even though the end result is the same piece of silicon.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor. You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor. Just because a $400 functionality processor came out of the chute, you expect them to give it to you for $200? Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available? Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version, thus making your $200 model more expensive?

The assumption is that, at $200, they're making a profit on that hardware. Thus, why are they doubling the price for the exact same piece of hardware? Artificially limiting one chip to make its identical neighbor chip seem more valuable is deceitful.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[vlm]

You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor. You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor. Just because a $400 functionality processor came out of the chute, you expect them to give it to you for $200? Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available? Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version, thus making your $200 model more expensive?

The annoyance is because in a free market they would never get away with this scam, and Americans incorrectly believe they do everything from CPU purchases to emergency room visits in a perfect, informed, efficient free market. And then this comes along (insert simpsons voice) Ha Ha.

Its like trying to figure out reality with a particle physics accelerator smashing core american values into the hard wall of facist reality, bean counting the little pieces that shatter off to try and understand whats up.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[NorQue]

Wrong. That just means that 400 USD processor you're trying to sell was only worth 200 USD to begin with.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[AngryDeuce]

This is silly. Most of the cost will be in the design and testing efforts, which are probably higher for the $400 version than for the $200 version, even though the end result is the same piece of silicon.

Why would production costs be more? It's the same thing, they're just "turning it down" as it were.

It is physically the exact same processor. There is no extra research being done into how to cheapen it's production, because if there was, the production would be cheaper for the most expensive model, too. The $200 is the actual cost, and the higher prices are inflated because they can. There is absolutely no justification for it outside of "we want more money", and that's fine, but at the same time, I want more processor than I paid for. Guess we're at an impasse then; they lock a good processor down to make me spend more money on the same thing, I hack the functionality back in because there's no real reason it isn't there to begin with. I don't lose very much sleep for doing this; we've already been paying far too much under ridiculous artificial scarcity models as it is.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[amorsen]

You can't escape this though, otherwise they wouldn't do it. AMD does the same except without the software unlock. Price discrimination like this only works if competition is bad -- which it is, because there are only 2 manufacturers of PC chips right now (plus a few others with small slices of the market). Entering the x86 market is extremely expensive, so this sorry state of affairs is unlikely to change.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Arlet]

How do you determine what something is worth, and why is that a better method than free market pricing ?

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Arlet]

Why would production costs be more?

No, I said the design cost for the faster version was more. Production costs are very similar. The fact that the design is already done doesn't matter. The up-front cost of that design still needs to be earned back by higher prices.

For the same reason, a fancy software package costs more than the production cost of the DVD that it came on, and why some software DVDs are more expensive than others, even though they have the same number of bits on the disk.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[AngryDeuce]

You can't escape this though, otherwise they wouldn't do it.

Sure you can; you hack the functionality back into it. In the past this was as easy as increasing a multiplier on a motherboard, but no matter how convoluted they try to make the process to keep people from squeezing power out of their devices, people will find a way around it. Jailbreaking, rooting...all these things are happening because people are getting sick and tired of having arbitrary restrictions imposed upon them that have no realistic basis other than "so we can charge you more for the one that has more capability but not have to actually spend more money creating one that is really superior."

If it costs more to produce, fine. But if it's just more artificial scarcity bullshit, sorry, not playing that game.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Sepodati]

Assume it costs $10,000 to make 100 processors and there's a 90% yield due to naturally occurring failures. You can sell the chips for $300 given the current market.

90% yield means 90 $100 processors sold for $300 = $18,000 profit

90% yield of "junk" processors means 9 $100 processors sold for $200 = $900 profit from "junk" chips

Total profit = $18,900 (potentially)

Now, you realize you're not selling all of your $300 processors (consumers want the $200 model more). 30% of high-end chips (assume) are sitting on the shelf, so $5,400 of profit is not realized and consumer demand for $200 chips is not met.

Total actual profit = $13,500

You have five options.

1) Sell everything at $200 and accept that this is "enough" profit. This is the solution you want.

99 $100 processors at $200 each = $9,900 profit

Or maybe sell all 90 "good" chips at a discount of $250 = $13,500 profit
You assume that consumers won't go elsewhere for a $200 processor and you can sell everything manufactured at this price point, though.

2) Only produce $200 chips since that's where the demand is at and assume it costs less to produce those chips, but still a 90% yield. Or maybe this is the option you want?

90 $75 processors at $200 each = $11,250 profit

3) Discount the $300 model to $250 to sell more of them. Assume only 4-5% sits on the shelf now.

86 $100 processors sold for $250 = $12,900
9 $100 processors sold for $200 = $900

Total profit $13,800

4) Product two separate chips with two separate manufacturing processes. I assume this will drive up manufacturing costs for each version.

$6,000 to make 50 "high-end" models.
$6,000 to make 50 "low-end" models.

90% yield, 45 $120 processors sold for $300 each = $8,100 profit
90% yield, 45 $120 processors sold for $200 each = $3,600 profit

Total profit = $11,700

5) Product same chip but "cripple" one version to be sold at lower price. Assume "crippling" adds some manufacturing cost.

$10,000 to make 100 "high-end" models, 90% yield = 90 "high-end" chips, 9 "low-end" chips (from natural yield)

45 $100 processors sold for $300 each = $9,000
9 $100 processors sold for $200 each = $900
45 $110 processors sold for $200 each = $4,050 (extra manufacturing cost is due to "crippling" them)

Total profit = $13,950

Now, obviously these number are made up. I honestly didn't tweak them to arrive at #5 having the most profit, so that's just a coincidence. Even with made up numbers, other options look almost as good. Since the industry has decided to go with #5 has a whole, though, obviously the numbers work out for them. In the end, the consumer is getting a level of functionality equal to the price they paid, regardless of what's inherently available within the chip. Also realize that the more profit at this level leads to the next generation of "low-end" chips that out-perform the "high-end" chips you're producing now.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Mr. Slippery]

Most of the cost will be in the design and testing efforts, which are probably higher for the $400 version than for the $200 version

If it's the same chip, and the difference betwee the $400 and $200 is how perfect the manufacturing process was that day, then the design effort is identical. If the $400 version is more thoroughly tested, fine; but that's not at all related to what's going on here, where the chip is within the higher spec but is deliberately crippled.

When manufacturers deliberately downgrade the quality of their product, you have a market failure.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Sepodati]

The manufacturing process creates a processor that's worth $400 on the market. Lower end "broken" or "crippled" versions are worth $200 on the market. It's up to the manufacturer to produce chips in a way that results in the lowest production cost overall yet satisfies both markets.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Arlet]

I'm talking about the design and testing that was done before actual production started. As you may be aware, it takes a lot of effort to design a faster CPU.

When manufacturers deliberately downgrade the quality of their product, you have a market failure.

It's not a market failure if the downgraded product is sold for a lower price.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[couchslug]

"I'm also interested in a crack, but only to cheat Intel out of money."

Buy AMD, and fuck them out of ALL the money. Buying cheap Intel still profits Intel.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[spire3661]

You have NO idea of the totality of economics that go into CPU design and selling.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Shark]

Arguably, in the x86 world, that's not free market pricing, that's duopoly pricing... And the other guy also engages in the same scam, because they don't have any competitor who won't.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Lehk228]

how much it costs to make it.

the idea that things should be priced on a supply demand curve with no relation to the actual cost to make them is asinine, it is religious bullshit from the church of the MBA

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Don't bother. He doesn't understand the difference between cost and value, and even if he did he'd still be pissed off if the profit margin was greater than some arbitrary number floating around in his head.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Arlet]

And how much does it cost to make a CPU that's, say, 10% faster than the previous one ? Don't forget all the effort in research, design, testing, and investing in new manufacturing equipment, before you can actually start producing the chips.

Suppose they invest $100 million for the first wafer of a new design, with a yield of 10 working chips. Should they sell these chips for $10 million a piece, since that was the actual cost to make them ?

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Your.Master]

Design costs are fixed costs and therefore fungible, whereas manufacturing costs are not.

If you cannot segment the market, and cannot ever change your price (after all, the design effort was identical 10 years from now as it is today...) then your price has to be:

Breakeven U Unit Price = Manufacturing cost + Design cost / Total number of units sold

This will not earn a profit so it's an absolute minimum. I've chosen U for unified.

However, if you can segment into A and B by downgrading some A to B, you can profitably sell B at a lower price than "breakeven" and still profit.

Breakeven A Unit Price = Manufacturing cost + Design cost / Total number of A units sold
Breakeven B Unit Price = Manufacturing cost

The high-end market got more expensive, according to the proportion of the market willing to pay for A quality. The low-end market got cheaper. In many cases this is what the market requires to happen.

It's easier to see how this works if you consider a scenario where the performance of unit B is exactly equal to the old unit A, call it A', which has the same manufacturing cost as A and B units, but had a lower design cost.

Breakeven A' Unit Price = Manufacturing cost + Design cost' / Total number of A' units sold
Breakeven B' Unit Price = Manufacturing cost

As you can see, the new product B is strictly better than the old products: higher performing than unit B', and the same performance as A' but at a lower price. Product A isn't important except in the fact that it makes product B possible. Therefore it's absolutely clear that the A / B model must replace the A' / B' models in the free market.

Now consider that instead of A / B, we want to use U. Now it is NOT clear that this must replace the A' / B' models, because although U is higher performing than both of these models, the breakeven price of U is higher than the B' price, and depending on the difference in design cost, possibly higher than the A' price too.

Given:

1. A / B > A' / B'
2. ~(U > A' / B')
C. ~(U > A / B)

The single-pricing model is not preferred by a rational free market over the two-price model.

The free market perfect competition models that say that a manufacturer should not downgrade performance for no downgrade in price apply in the limit, as sales go to infinity, which does not ever happen. At that point, the marginal design cost goes to zero, and THEN the market sells only unit A. Until then, the market calls for segmentation, and that's only a failure in the sense that capitalism is itself a failure.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Mr. Slippery]

How do you determine what something is worth, and why is that a better method than free market pricing ?

What does this have to do with free markets? Eliminate all those government-issued patents Intel holds, and then revoke its government-issued corporate charter, and then we can talk about free markets.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Nethead]

Its like trying to figure out reality with a particle physics accelerator smashing core american values into the hard wall of facist reality, bean counting the little pieces that shatter off to try and understand whats up.

I so wish that was under 120 chars.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

To me it looks like this is a special microcode update. Microcode is validated by the processor itself, so you cannot easily "crossflash" microcode... unless you're the processor vendor, obviously.

It is also possible for the processor to refuse to install the special microcode if special sequences are not followed (e.g. it may disable such upgrade microcodes from loading after the BIOS or the OS loaded a regular microcode update).

There is a known, _fully documented_ way to field-burn a microcode update into a BIOS that supports it, it is in the same Intel manual that describes the online microcode update process (which all operating systems support), there is no reason why it or something close to it couldn't be what intel is doing. There you have it: switch motherboards, and you lose the new microcode as it is not in the standard microcode tables available to OEMs.

It should be possible to just run the update process again, especially if it is keyed to the processor serial number instead of the BIOS, though.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[lgarner]

That is so completely wrong, it's hard to imagine that it's not meant as a joke. The cost to product is completely unrelated to the final price. The only thing that determines price is what it's worth *to the buyer*. An informed buyer won't pay more for a chip than it's worth to them, and a seller won't sell it for less than it's worth to them. Should Intel reduce their prices simply because somebody wants their product cheaper? Should Apple? Should Ferrari? For that matter, should AMD? Should I work for less pay if I'm able?

This assumes a free market, and even in a duopoly that's possible since any one else is free to make chips. If there's actual collusion between companies to prop up prices, that's both wrong and illegal and isn't what's being discussed here, as far as I know. In these examples, you bought a $300 chip because it was worth $300 to you, not because the manufacturer paid $299 to build it.

This argument is just silly.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I definitely agree with this. I would be fine with a rolling release i.e. pay more for the latest greatest and less for the old. These days production is centered around stock holder return and profit margins on Wall street, not producing a product. Thanks Wall street...assholes. I'll spend my extra time and money buying things from honest start ups on the forefront of technology that sell a product so for the purpose of producing something. As much as I love America and capitalist principles, its produced an economy based on money and greed, not production and technology. America: the reason we are falling behind in STEM and GDP, its because you'd rather make money than earn it. Congratulations. I'll go back to my humble log cabin and smithy all the patented, trademarked, copyrighted crap that I need to live comfortably because I need it, not because some ad says I should buy it. This is a Maker's pride: the attitude that got us on top of the world, now lost among the population. Please excuse the ranting.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[iCEBaLM]

The design for both chips is the same, since it's the same fucking chip, and therefore cost exactly the same amount of money to design.

Why are you trying to defend intel here? This is pure money grabbing.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to say "Now, GET OFF MY LAWN!!!".

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[LordLimecat]

I find I am becoming more and more militant when it comes to bogus moneymaking schemes these tech companies create by eliminating preexisting functionality and charging you extra to give it back to you.

Well I have good news, because I have a solution that doesnt require any work, nor any illegal nor unethical activities.

Use AMD instead.

Whats that, you want Intels product, because its faster than AMD's? Yea, that totally entitles you to break the use terms of their product.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Khyber]

"You only count the raw manufacturing cost of turning a lump of silicon in a working CPU."

I see someone never took a basic logistics course. You think manufacturing is the ONLY expense counted?

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh, they've been doing this on supercomputers forever. They ship unused memory within the supercomputer. Need more space for that end of year crunch? Call up Cray and they will send a tech with a turnkey to enable the memory. All set and don't need that extra space? Call up Cray and cancel your extra memory service. The man with the magic key comes back and shuts them down. Is it open? Hell no. But it isn't a new or bogus moneymaking scheme. It's been the norm for a while now.

That being said, I think it is destined for failure because you can't lock anything up in software. It will be broken if there is sufficient incentive to do so. And I'd say free CPU upgrade is sufficient incentive.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[vux984]

You get EXACTLY what you pay for when buying a processor.

No you don't.

You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor.

What makes it $200 functionality? Because intel said it was $200 functionality?

you expect them to give it to you for $200?

I expect the market to set the price. Instead Intel is artitificially creating scarcity and product differentiation where there isn't actually any.

Or maybe you'd be happier if only $400 models were available?

Given its the only model they make, and they plan to sell the majority of them for less than $400 clearly if the market set the price it would be less than $400.

Or if the company was required to actually produce completely separate dies for each version

There doesn't need to be more than one die because there is only one product. The existence of additional "products" are purely artificial market manipulation.

In a properly functioning free market, competition would force intel to sell the best product they have at the best price they can set it and still continue to fund production, r&d, and extract sufficient profit to stay motivated to remain in business.

This isn't happening.

Instead they took the product they have and made the fully working version artificially scarce by disabling parts of them to create "lesser products", this serves to let them charge a premium for the original working product.

That DOESN'T happen if you have sufficient competition that you need to deliver the best product you can at the best price you can.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Sepodati]

Is there really any scarcity? I can go buy i7 processors from $300 to $1,000 USD at Newegg right now. Only one looks like it's out of stock.

Are you okay with product differentiation as a result of natural manufacturing defects? The market clearly shows there's a demand for a range of low, mid and high-functionality processors. Why does it matter if this differentiation is a result of natural or artificial means so long as market demand at each level is satisfied?

Sure, more competition and lower prices overall would be nice, but that's a separate issue, imo. The differentiation allows Intel to recoup R&D, marketing, IP and overall business costs across a range of products and provide more choices to the consumer.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[ElusiveJoe]

why is that a better method than free market pricing ?

It's not. The whole software 'thing' is not ruled by free market. Free market and economics assume that to make a product you have to invest resources in it (which are limited, and therefore valuable) , which makes its basic value. But if you can copy (or enhance like in this case) virtual items for zero cost - the basic cost is no longer determined by economics (maybe by something else). If it costs you nothing to enhance the product - the added value of the enhanced product will be zero. And if you charge people for nothing - it is scam.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Vectormatic]

AMD is substantially less scammy then intel though. Intel does/did a whole bunch of product differentiation by disabling features on their cheaper cpu's which didnt just impact performance. for a good while intel sold "cheap" chips without their virtualization extensions enabled, which in turn bit people in the ass with windows 7s XP mode (and yes, i know MS eventually patched it to also run without vt extensions).

Binning chips for clock-speed and selling chips with core/cache defects for lower prices with those cores/caches disabled is one thing, willfully disabling features on your cheaper chips just sucks

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Vectormatic]

if i hadnt already posted, you would have gotten a +1 insightfull

Sadly though, you will have to make do with this comment.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel spends huge amounts of money on research and marketing to make high end processors that you can't afford. Because Intel doesn't want you to miss out, they offer you a crippled version of their high-end technology for a discount.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Kashgarinn]

Whittling in public can get you killed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLiAWdq9pf0&t=59s

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Targon]

This only comes into play with new designs and tweaking existing designs to faster speeds. If an initial design comes up with the same chip in three different speed bins, you might see 3.6GHz, 3.4GHz, and 3.2GHz, same exact chip, same exact design cost, same cache memory, same cost to produce these chips. If the yields are good, all three chips may even QA properly at the 3.6GHz speed. Now, it stands to reason that the manufacturer may lock the slower speed chips to encourage people to buy a higher end chip, but to say, "Oh yea, we will unlock it for you for a price", and if it is a bit of software to do it, that just seems fishy, since the consumer SHOULD be able to do it themselves.

AMD knows this, and that is why they released the "Black Edition" processors as unlocked. They have made a profit on the CPU at the speed they sold it for, but to encourage people to buy higher profit margin items, they make it so those who know how to build their own computers can take advantage of the whole system.

Now, when they improve the design, then it makes sense that more money had to go into design or fab process improvements, but then, it goes to making the "slower" chips cheaper to produce. If you add cache, then it makes sense that it will cost more to manufacture, so paying more makes sense as well. The moment the $400 chip costs the exact same amount to manufacture as the $200 chip, that is when the price structure starts to bother people.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Targon]

You still have the issue where there are different tiers of products from a design perspective. More or less cache, speed differences due to using a low power design vs. a high power design, etc.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[PixelJaded]

A large chunk of Intel's cost is R&D. Intel could do the R&D, give it away for free to companies who then manufacture and sell the chips at close to cost. Unfortunately this model would only work if Intel was doing all the research for free. This means either Intel borrowing enormous amounts of money, then declaring bankrupcty and causing a massive financial loss to those who lent the money, or alternatively engineers with families getting paid $0 salaies and paying for their equipment out of their own pockets on top of that.

Another scenario is Intel skipping on research, continue to manufacture on their previous technology, and create only 1.8GHz chips. What they do instead is invest in research to build 2.0Ghz chips, then using the new technology manufacture 2.0GHz chips (for those who are prepared to help fund the research) and as a side benefit produce cheaper 1.8GHz chips for those who aren't. Everybody wins.

Investment and research is not necessarily a zero sum game. From Intel's perspective, this research is hurting their short term profits. Its competition in the market between Intel, AMD, etc. that drives the continuous improvement in value. If Intel stopped refining its technology then AMD would eventually have a large cost / performance advantage and destroy Intel's business. Sure some of Intel's short term profits derive from brand power, but this would quickly evaporate in the long run if they failed to compete on technology.

When companies giving you better value products every year causes you to go into militant nerd rage then you probably need to re-evaluate your priorities. The reason their are not many competitors is because what AMD and Intel do is very difficult, and they are very good at it. Even then AMD makes a loss most quarters because prices are so low in the CPU market. Competing against Intel is suicidal because they are a very efficient business (aided by vast economy of scale), and they've shown a willingness to stay price competitive with their rivals, rather than always trying to extract an "Intel" premium based on brand power alone. Their immense profitability derives from their phenomenal quality record (due to strong investment in testing at the expense of short term profit) and strong investment in research (again at the expense of short term profit).

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe it's time to take up sports fanaticism, or whittling?"

Sports plz. A giant foam finger suites you more than a knife/sharp object.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[jenningsthecat]

Is there really any scarcity? I can go buy i7 processors from $300 to $1,000 USD at Newegg right now. Only one looks like it's out of stock.

Not relevant. The scarcity being discussed relates to the speeds of the chips mentioned in TFA. Since ALL of those chips have the same speed capability, and since some of the chips are being purposely hobbled, the supposed 'scarcity' of full-speed chips that is used to justify their higher price, is artificial by definition.

Are you okay with product differentiation as a result of natural manufacturing defects? The market clearly shows there's a demand for a range of low, mid and high-functionality processors. Why does it matter if this differentiation is a result of natural or artificial means so long as market demand at each level is satisfied?

If everybody could get the high speed processors for the price of the lower speed processors, there would be NO market demand for the lower-speed parts. And since the higher speeds don't actually cost Intel any more to make, the 'market demand at each level' is being dictated by Intel, not by the market.

The differentiation allows Intel to recoup R&D, marketing, IP and overall business costs across a range of products and provide more choices to the consumer.

The differentiation allows Intel to make scads and scads more profit than they would if there was real competition in the market. Period.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take up whittling, it's far less obnoxious and allows you to avoid other people who are obnoxious (sports fanatics). Besides, you can make some pretty and/or useful objects for yourself and others.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[foobsr]

You get $200 functionality for a $200 processor.

No headroom for different layers of profits anymore? Good news indeed.

CC.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[foobsr]

I'd like it if a product's cost was tied to the cost of production plus a reasonable profit margin ...

These days are long gone; now they take what they can get, and, since that is not enough, are inventing new ways to condense resources into the hands of a select few.

CC.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Antisyzygy]

Someone needs to take economics 101. Market prices are set by supply and demand. If a bunch of 400 dollar processors come out of the shoot instead of 200 dolalr processors the supply of them goes up. Since there is similar demand for them across the market, the price should go down for the consumer. This is artificial market manipulation and is a load of monopolistic greedy bullshit. Its one of the reasons our economy is doing so bad, greed. Furthermore, this is nothing like what you said in the first place. Intel is manufacturing perfectly functional 400 dollar processors and selling them for 200, charging you 200 to "unlock" them up to a 400 dollar processor. Its not the same as before when a 400 dollar processor might come out of assembly and not be capable of performing at the level of a 400 dollar processor, so they down-clock it or disable a couple cores and sell it for 200 to recoup losses. Thats what AMD did with their X3 processors and even some of the X2's. Intel used to do it too. I suspect since manufacturing has advanced they now don't produce many duds, and so they are now trying to squeeze the consumer for more cash by artificially segmenting the market. If in manufacturing you produce products more efficiently and more of them, it should already increase their profits on each processor across the board and as such you should be getting a 400 dollar processor for maybe 300.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Antisyzygy]

Both are the same chip. I.e. there is literally no difference between them at all from the silicon itself all the way down to the arrangement of the transistors. The only thing that is different is how much of the chip's capabilities they allow you to use and its price.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Antisyzygy]

I understand the numbers, however the principal is still anti-consumer.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[foobsr]

He doesn't understand the difference between cost and value,

And you presumably believe that of course 'value' is exclusively determined by ''objective'' criteria, marketing (advertising included) having no say in the evaluation process.

CC.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[vux984]

Is there really any scarcity? I can go buy i7 processors from $300 to $1,000 USD at Newegg right now. Only one looks like it's out of stock.

Intel is simulating scarcity. That's my whole point... the high functioning cpu's aren't rarer than the low functioning ones, they don't cost more to make than the low functioning ones. The factors that make the high functioning CPUs cost more are ALL artificial.

The market clearly shows there's a demand for a range of low, mid and high-functionality processors.

Think about it: If low, high, and mid functioning processors were sitting on a shelf at the same price -- which they well could be since they are all actually precisely the same product, how many people would pick the low? or mid?

Zero.

Why does it matter if this differentiation is a result of natural or artificial means so long as market demand at each level is satisfied?

Because Intel is doing it to extract more money from you than it would be able to do in a free market.

Sure, more competition and lower prices overall would be nice, but that's a separate issue, imo. The differentiation allows Intel to recoup R&D, marketing, IP and overall business costs across a range of products and provide more choices to the consumer.

Yes. choices. fake choices. Like going to a bar that makes its own rum and being offered the cheap rum or the premium rum at 2 different prices. That's fine... right?

Once upon a time, the bar made rum, using one process... and 80% of it was graded tier 2, and 20% was graded tier 1. So they sold the teir 2 rum at one price $1/oz, and the teir 1 stuff for triple the price. $3/oz.

Over the years the bar had gotten its quality control down to the point that nearly everything it produced was graded tier 1. 97% was tier 1 rum.

What should happen? The vast majority of patrons will balk at paying $3/oz for rum, but they don't have nearly enough cheap rum to satisfy the market. The bar can clearly afford to sell the good stuff for $1/oz now, but then they'd be giving up the lucrative profit they used to make on the 20% for the good stuff.

So rather than scavenge their high end sales... they pour a bit of hand soap and cat piss in 80% of the barrels to ruin the flavor.

The reason this works is because there aren't any other bars in town. If market was functioning, people would just switch to another bar.

That is essentially intel's business model.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

He doesn't understand the difference between cost and value,

And you presumably believe that of course 'value' is exclusively determined by ''objective'' criteria, marketing (advertising included) having no say in the evaluation process.

CC.

No. Value is determined solely and exclusively by the customer.

Re:Tied to the motherboard?

[HappyPsycho]

If there is a manufacturing price difference wouldn't the cheaper chip be more expensive to manufacture? It has all the features of the more expensive one + locks for the features.

Why would they be higher in terms of R&D? They shot for Saturn and landed on Mars, in most industries that's deemed a failure and they get nothing. The R&D money was for the trip to Saturn not a trip to Mars. They get to sell the failure to offset the cost of the mission anyway so they are not exactly losing. Unless you count the R&D invested in creating the locks, which will only start increasing the cost of the cheaper chip towards the more expensive chip.

Naaaaa

[Anonymous Coward]

Did not see the cost.
Think I will pass because 10-15% increase is really something in day-to-day operations you will not see.
I have always told my clients that 20% factored with the amount of $$ has a cut-off point.
That is unless you pockets are bleeding money and I'll glad to help you.
Not, most folks don't have the money, time, snap to keep the malware removal up to date.

bigger problem

[bussdriver]

What about the DRM built-in the CPUs?? you know they have some horrible system in place to support this; otherwise, the upgrades will leak out on the internet and we will get them for free.... just think of the malware that could use such features.

Re:bigger problem

[vlm]

What about the DRM built-in the CPUs?? you know they have some horrible system in place to support this; otherwise, the upgrades will leak out on the internet and we will get them for free.... just think of the malware that could use such features.

Naah, much more likely to see malware that'll misconfigure hardware on such and such date, literally blowing it up or at least burning it out, unless you send $20 to a certain address ending in .ru for a protection code you can enter... after which it threatens to blow up the CPU on a later date, unless you send $40 to a new address for ... Of course anyone who runs windows pretty much deserves to be shaken down for all they've got.

Also I'm mystified how this "upgrade" software works on linux.

Re:bigger problem

[Renraku]

So you're saying that because I like to play games (besides tux racer and rogue clones) at a reasonable speed on reasonable hardware, and so I deserve to be targeted by criminals.

Stay classy, sir or madam.

Re:bigger problem

[Anonymous Coward]

doubtful.

Here's what I expect:
1. Legitimate resellers (eg tigerdirect, ncix, newegg, frys, etc) will buy them, and include cards that state they can be upgraded via software.
2. Illegitimate resellers (example: independently owned computer stores run by PRC expats, or the same people who sell counterfeit shit anyways) will just buy the upgrade once, and pocket the upgrade difference by upgrading all the CPU's.
3. End users who buy systems made by Dell, HP, and will never realize they can upgrade the CPU via software.

You'll note that the upgradeable chips are all low-end parts. So if someone was only willing to spend 400$ on a computer, you can sure as hell bet they won't spend money to upgrade it.

Re:bigger problem

[exomondo]

Also I'm mystified how this "upgrade" software works on linux.

You've never done a bios update with a bootable drive?

Can't access the article...

[wisebabo]

I know I shouldn't be RTFA but I couldn't read it. Slashdotted already?

I just wanted to know if these "upgrades" is done by changing the micro-codes. Or are there some FPGAs in the chips? Just curious, very obviously I'm not a chip designer!

Also, does this mean that someone (who REALLY knows what they're doing), could upgrade a "cheap" chip into something more expensive? Or add new features/try new designs or instructions? Isn't there some "hardware" encoded security aspects to these chips that might become vulnerable (like DRM)?

Re:Can't access the article...

[mehrotra.akash]

From one of the above comments, it seems to be a BIOS flag or something similar

Re:Can't access the article...

[Idbar]

There is no article. The only link on the summary is a link to the upgrade page, where you can download an upgrade for Windows. I wasn't even asked anything, just downloaded the file. If you have one of the processors from the list, perhaps you can try it. I didn't see they were charging for it.

To me, they probably found that these can run faster without blowing them and they are providing you with the option. Of course, I assume also, this will also increase the power consumption.

Re:Can't access the article...

[jklovanc]

They sell an upgrade card with a one use Pin. The download is free the card costs.

Re:Overclocking is bad, unless you pay us more fir

[mehrotra.akash]

Except that you probably cannot overclock them yourself as it wont be a K series processor

disgusting

[v1]

and Ford, they're going to sell you a car, and you can purchase an upgrade on your fuel economy, cooler air from the air conditioning, and enable the side-curtain airbags and heated seats too, for an additional fee, all as software upgrades.

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

You could damage it (don't want the run-flat bladdered tires? they'll just shank the bladders with an ice pick near the end of the assembly line) or by disabling it via software. It's only natural to expect buyers to look for ways to re-enable disabled features. And we've seen so many times how manufacturers like to think they still somehow can tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use the product you purchased from them. (they want to sell it to you, but not really sell, as in, it's your property to do with as you please) God I hate that.

I'm really quite surprised that by now we're not seeing manufacturers trying to license physical goods. So you buy a computer. But you didn't really buy it, you licensed the use and Dell still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it. (or cancel your license for any reason at any time, and demand you return it)

But closer to back on topic, so what's the going wager on whether they'll play the ever-popular DMCA card (for circumventing a protection device) if these get hacked back to top specs? I'm betting near 100%.

Re:disgusting

[foxx1337]

License physical goods? Look no further than Apple, my friend.

Re:disgusting

[Microlith]

And we've seen so many times how manufacturers like to think they still somehow can tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use the product you purchased from them. (they want to sell it to you, but not really sell, as in, it's your property to do with as you please) God I hate that.

Oh, don't you dare criticize companies like that. You'll enrage some Apple fan!

Re:disgusting

[Idbar]

Did you try the upgrade already? Did you have to pay for it? Nice way to go with your rants. I have an i5 so I can't try it, but I went to the link and downloaded with no much trouble with NO QUESTIONS ASKED.

But let the rage blind us and start senseless rants, just like in London!

Re:disgusting

[Idbar]

Hey this is an old video but I'm pretty sure that if they are providing you with a mechanism to increase the frequency, is because they're confident you won't blow your processor.

Again, let me know if you find what they "charge" for the offered upgrade.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't they doing that already with cars: sell different models of same type, only with different horse power. The car motor management software controls which version you have ... and some less scrupulous dealers will "upgrade" your software so that the motor produces more power.

Re:disgusting

[Sepodati]

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

What's the issue here? You think everyone should be forced to buy the top-end model because that's the only one manufacturers should make available? If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functionality built into the car to make manufacturing cheaper, doesn't mean it should be given to you for free.

Re:disgusting

[jklovanc]

The download is free. The pin you need to do the upgrade costs money.

Re:disgusting

[Fjandr]

AT&T used to do that with telephones, and most cable companies still do it with set-top boxes used to decode digital cable signals (but not /really/, honest, you can buy a DVC from another company and use it. Maybe. If we let you.)

There are laws in the USA that prevent many companies from requiring rental (what "licensing" a physical product actually is) of their own equipment in order to access services, but so far as I know none that prevent companies from renting products that are not actually tied to a service they sell.

Re:disgusting

[firesyde424]

Bad news on this one, if you own a current gen gaming console(Xbox 360 ect...), this is already the case.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really quite surprised that by now we're not seeing manufacturers trying to license physical goods. So you buy a computer. But you didn't really buy it, you licensed the use and Dell still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it. (or cancel your license for any reason at any time, and demand you return it)

As others have pointed out... look no further than Apple. Once every physical item has a CPU in it (and this is coming) - then ridiculous software licenses leak into the real world There is one other point: there is a name for people who don't own anything, and just rent it with all the conditions attached.

Serfs.

Re:disgusting

[BradleyUffner]

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

What's the issue here? You think everyone should be forced to buy the top-end model because that's the only one manufacturers should make available? If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functionality built into the car to make manufacturing cheaper, doesn't mean it should be given to you for free.

Yes, it does... If I bought the car, I own it, and everything that is physically part of it at the time of purchase. Including the "extra" $30,000 worth of performance.

Re:disgusting

[Sepodati]

Then you should only buy top of the line model cars and processors. Then you're not getting "screwed" out of anything. Leave the "crippled" stuff for the rest of us that are okay with spending less money for a level of functionality that suits us.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

But you didn't really buy it, you licensed the use and Dell still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it.

It's called a lease and lots of people do it.

Re:disgusting

[vlm]

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

What's the issue here? You think everyone should be forced to buy the top-end model because that's the only one manufacturers should make available? If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functionality built into the car to make manufacturing cheaper, doesn't mean it should be given to you for free.

A much better standard /. car analogy is you can legally enable certain pre-installed hardware in your car, like a 6th gear in the transmission or 5 more PSI of turbo boost if you want to pay the aftermarket money, but its WAY funnier when your car catches a drive-by virus which tries to increase the turbo boost to 750 PSI and blasts itself into dust. Or applies a model 832 air conditioning valve routing map to a model 2942 air conditioner which unfortunately reroutes pure carbon monoxide into the air ducts while perma-welding shut the door latch solenoids.

That's what I'm waiting for, and that's gonna be funny to watch.

Re:disgusting

[Wildclaw]

If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality

In a country using free market ideology, you get $20,000 of labor and materials when paying $20,000. How much that functionality is worth to you is completely irrelevant except to determine if anyone is willing to buy it in the first place.

At least that is what used to count as free market economy. Considering how much free market theory has been raped in the ass, it is not strange that people believe otherwise.

Re:disgusting

[BradleyUffner]

Then you should only buy top of the line model cars and processors. Then you're not getting "screwed" out of anything. Leave the "crippled" stuff for the rest of us that are okay with spending less money for a level of functionality that suits us.

Why should I pay more for the exact same hardware? What value is added that justifies the higher price? If I pay $100 for a CPU that is capable of running at 3ghz I should be able to make it run at 3ghz, even if it is sold as running at 2ghz. I paid for the physical hardware, I can do whatever I want with it, including running it at 2ghz, 3ghz, or destroying it by trying to run it at 10ghz. If the someone sold me something capable of running at 3ghz at the price of something that runs at 2ghz, then that's their problem, not mine, and they have no right to try and restrict my use of it.

Re:disgusting

[Arlet]

What value is added that justifies the higher price?

It runs faster.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

Mercedes use the same engine for all cars from C250 downwards and then use different levels of supercharging (and possibly software) to set a performance level.

I don't know of other manufacturers who do this.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

You must never have seen a counterfeit Lexus. The counterfeits are simply rebadged Toyota's.

Re:disgusting

[spire3661]

The Supreme Court ruled otherwise....

Re:disgusting

[BradleyUffner]

What value is added that justifies the higher price?

It runs faster.

Nope. As mentioned earlier, it is capable of running at 3ghz.

It may go 2ghz /by default/, But that shouldn't stop me from making it reach its full speed.

Re:disgusting

[Necroman]

Intel has been doing this for years, they just haven't monetized it until recently.

Working for a company that built custom motherboards around intel chips, we had access to intel white and yellow manuals (I think there is red and black above that). The tech manuals explains various registers on the CPU and what they do. The better the manual, the more information you get about the CPU.

It's fun to spend a couple weeks trying to figure out a CPU bug that you keep hitting while trying to boot. Then on a call with Intel Engineering, they are like "oh, just flip this bit in this register and it'll fix that". A bit that isn't documented in any way in the manuals we have. Well, I should say, it is listed as "reserved".

For years, Intel has been manufacturing 1 CPU for an entire line. Looking at the Intel i7-9xx series (920, 930, 940, 950, 960, 965), they tend to all be a single chip. What changes between them is the quality of the CPU (how hot and fast it can run) and which magical registers are set to "1" instead of "0".

Re:disgusting

[Arlet]

But that shouldn't stop me from making it reach its full speed

What's stopping you is the security features they've designed into the CPU to prevent this.

My computer is quite capable of running software, like Photoshop, but that doesn't mean it should be provided with the computer for free (or for the manufacturing cost of a DVD), or that you should be allowed to copy it from your friend.

Re:disgusting

[luther349]

until they rename it something else and say the same thing again. sony anyone.

Re:disgusting

[Bengie]

ATI/AMD/INTEL/NVIDIA/ARM/IBM have all been doing this since CPUs first came out. The only difference is Intel wants to make it a "soft" change instead of a hard one.

Kind of line the ATI6950 bios flash mod to re-enable shaders. The new 6950s can't be flashed anymore because they laser cut them. It costs ATI more money to use a laser cut than a bios flash, but if it keeps people from "hacking" their cards and getting a free upgrade.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Psychopath]

The issue here is the manufacturers are starting to realize just how much overhead they're spending making so many different models of products, and that it's cheaper to just manufacture one model, the best one, and then cripple it if you don't want to pay for the best.

What's the issue here? You think everyone should be forced to buy the top-end model because that's the only one manufacturers should make available? If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functionality built into the car to make manufacturing cheaper, doesn't mean it should be given to you for free.

Yes, it does... If I bought the car, I own it, and everything that is physically part of it at the time of purchase. Including the "extra" $30,000 worth of performance.

So you're ok if you buy a $20K car, then purchase $30K of physical bolt-on accessories to turn it into a $50K car? Or perhaps it's better to sell your $20K car used for $15K? Confused about why the upgrade process itself seems so upsetting to you.

Re:disgusting

[Shark]

If they sell it to you for 20,000$, you can bet your bottom dollar that it cost them 15,000$ to produce. Even if there's a 50,000$ model with all the stuff enabled.

There's nothing wrong with putting a 50,000$ price tag on a 15,000$ car assuming people are willing to pay that kind of premium but the only reason why anyone would get away with that is price-fixing and collusion. Else there would be a company just way too happy to sell you an equivalent of the 50,000$ model for 25,000$ and seize the entire market.

I personally blame patents and industry-driven lets-make-sure-nobody-can-enter-the-market regulations for this kind of crap.

Re:disgusting

[Mr. Slippery]

If you by a $20,000 car, you get $20,000 functionality. Just cause there's $50,000 functionality built into the car to make manufacturing cheaper, doesn't mean it should be given to you for free.

If they can build a car for $20,000 - X, where X is some reasonable bit of profit, but are able to sell that car at $50,000, you have a market failure. Competition should be keeping the end price around that $20,000 level

Re:disgusting

[Sepodati]

I think it'd be hard to pin an exact percentage of R&D costs on each individual vehicle or processor made. The $20k car contributes less profit per sale but more volume while the $50k car produces more profit at a lower volume. There's a market for both levels. I don't see why price-fixing and collusion HAVE to be involved, although they certainly can.

Re:disgusting

[roman_mir]

I'm really quite surprised that by now we're not seeing manufacturers trying to license physical goods

- AT&T had government monopoly and was doing exactly that for a very long time - leasing you the phone.

Re:disgusting

[AngryDeuce]

What you're describing isn't the same thing at all. We're not going out and getting something for nothing. We're taking a product that we bought for an agreed upon price and bringing it home and doing what we want with it.

There's a line between software piracy extracting functionality that is locked off. I mean, you can see the line, right? Like said above, if Intel didn't want us overclocking our 2 GHz chips to run at 3GHz, they probably shouldn't have sold us chips capable of running at 3GHz for the price of a 2GHz one.

This is why I don't feel bad at all about rooting, or jailbreaking, or any of the other things people do to extract functionality out of a given product...but I do feel bad pirating software. I gave the company my money, it's my fucking device...and don't sit here and cry because consumers are starting to be able to game the system the same way the system has gamed them for decades. Everyone that knows about computers has known about these games with CPU speeds for decades, and how much potential there was in a given chip to be pushed beyond it's specs (in some, an insane amount, like my old Athalon XP). The difference NOW is that Intel has found a way to monetize that, and their going to enforce it in what I'm sure is going to end up another stupid IP issue in the goddamn courts about how we don't really own the processor so aren't allowed to do it. Fuck that.

Here's a crazy concept that I'm sure will blow everyone's minds: How about they charge top dollar for the best processor, then, next year when the new best processor comes out, the reduce the price of last year's model? Holy crap, imagine that!

I suppose that wouldn't work, though. For one thing, it would reduce the number of times they arbitrarily change the socket type on your motherboard. Can't have that, especially when you produce chipsets for those motherboards...

Re:disgusting

[Sepodati]

How do you define the cost of development ($20,000-X) and who defines "reasonable"? R&D isn't tied to specific models and years of cars or processors.

Re:disgusting

[thejynxed]

Considering that Toyota owns and manufactures the Lexus brand, this isn't too surprising really. All Lexus really is, is rebadged Toyotas, possibly with a few swapped out body panels and inside trim. The engine, frame, etc are all exactly the same.

Re:disgusting

[BradleyUffner]

So you're ok if you buy a $20K car, then purchase $30K of physical bolt-on accessories to turn it into a $50K car? Or perhaps it's better to sell your $20K car used for $15K? Confused about why the upgrade process itself seems so upsetting to you.

Because in this case, you don't actually get anything for the "upgrade", you are paying for nothing. Everything you get with the upgrade you already had before.
Instead of paying for "value added" you are paying for "value not taken away".

Would you be ok if I sold you a whole apple but only allowed you to to eat half of it until you paid me an extra fee? Once you buy the apple from me, and I hand you an entire apple, you are well within your rights to eat the entire thing. If you only wanted to sell me half an apple, then sell me half an apple, not a whole one and expect me to eat only half of it.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Psychopath]

I think I understand. You would prefer to replace something rather than an in-place upgrade, if the only way to perform that upgrade was with a license rather than a physical widget. Personally I like things like trial/shareware software and tiered purchase options, and the market does too, by and large. But to each their own.

Re:disgusting

[duk242]

Or maybe they're hoping you *will* blow your processor... Then they can sell you a new one!

Re:disgusting

[gottabeme]

Are you a troll or just stupid?

This hypothetical CPU in question already has the ability to run at 3 GHz, but is artificially restricted from doing so in order to create a tiered market in order to suck more money from consumers in order to make the manufacturer richer. The extra money charged to enable the 3 GHz speed is nothing but gravy, because the CPU costs the same to manufacture whether the 3 GHz speed is enabled or not. No--in fact, it costs more to manufacture with the "security features". If they didn't spend the money designing and producing extra silicon to artificially shaft--sorry, restrict--their customers, they'd have more profit.

You can't compare two separate things--your computer, and Photoshop--to the innate physical properties of a CPU, artificially hampered for no good reason. Doing so is either foolish or disingenuous.

Which is it?

If it's foolish ignorance, educate yourself using The Internet.

If it's the latter, you support greed and are evil. Reasoning with evil is itself foolish.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

Licensing physical goods is already a [more] common practice. I bought a Lexmark inkjet for late 2007; it's been my only bout with forced cartridge replacements. Each box brings the ink separately shrink-wrapped in a EULA, unlike any other ink I had ever bought (emphasis mine, of course):

Opening this package or using the print cartridge inside confirms your acceptance of the following license/agreement: The patented print cartridge contained inside is licensed for a single use only and is designated to stop working after delivering a fixed amount of ink. A variable amount of ink will remain in the cartridge when replacement is required. After this single use, the license to use the print cartridge terminates, and the used cartridge must be returned only to Lexmark for remanufacturing, refilling or recycling.

Funny that they can say "deliver a fixed amount of ink" and yet a "variable" is supposed to remain in each "empty" cartridge (with no percentage estimates, apologies or refunds to you.) It's obvious that their algorithm is bad, say, based on a computationally cheap fixed # of dots printed rather than a more expensive and realistic weighed amount of ink.

To keep people from injecting cheap ink into old carts (never my intention) their driver puts up a click-through nag prior to every low-ink printout. After enough of those, it starts rejects all further printjob until it detects a different cart. Swapping in old "spent" carts sometimes fools it into printing a few more times, and what is offensive is that those super old printouts *never* show any ink degradation expected of a low-ink condition, even if the driver keeps counting until they "run dry" again. The estimation algorithm is unfair, and the licensee loses all rights to manage their ink and waste (?). Unlike my older purchase circa Mandrake 7 in 2002, this one doesn't even have Linux support, so I'm never buying the brand again. After all, it makes sense that they would NOT allow an open system giving me power that got DRM'd out of my hands by a greedy Windows driver.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

you can buy a BMW and purchase an upgrade of your engine software

Re:disgusting

[cgenman]

Your car analogy isn't terribly far from the truth. Most manufacturers have a limited range of engines and other parts. Some of these parts are up or down tuned to match the targeted market segment. Now, it's true that these more closely track the cost of the part in question... Toyota's NZ engine used in their line of small cares genuinely is an underpowered engine, no matter how you slice it. And when engines are weakened to fit a market segment, usually they are tuned to get additional Fuel Economy in the bargain. So there is generally a benefit and tradeoff involved. But there are definitely artificial distinctions made between 20k dollar cars and 50k dollar cars, in an attempt to hit the sweet spot in market segmentation.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

So you buy a computer. But you didn't really buy the OS, you licensed the use and Apple still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it.

FTFY

And yeah, I fucking hate it too. But only slightly less than I hate Steve Jobs for not taking my $150 and letting me run OS X on a far superior workstation that I assembled myself using the same or superior parts than Apple would at a substantially deflated price.

Fuck corporations and fuck government.

Re:disgusting

[uniquegeek]

They are already going there with service-based email, docs, storage. Some ISPs only rent equipment.

I'm sure some executives are rubbing their hands together, waiting to force us onto subscription-based thin clients instead of computer boxes. Fortunately, we can count geekdom to not let it get out of hand.

Re:disgusting

[ElusiveJoe]

I'm really quite surprised that by now we're not seeing manufacturers trying to license physical goods. So you buy a computer. But you didn't really buy it, you licensed the use and Dell still owns it and is just loaning it to you, and can legally tell you how you are and aren't allowed to use it. (or cancel your license for any reason at any time, and demand you return it)

They could also make you sign a several-year contract with ISP, like with cell-phones. And all your files and programs will be kept in the cloud, so if you fail to pay for connection - you'll loose all data. (Chrome OS for the win!). Oh, and they also own any content you produce using their connection.

Re:disgusting

[Targon]

People are more annoyed by buying the $20,000 car, that is identical to the $50,000 car, except for a governor that has been installed at the factory by the manufacturer. Now, if this happened to you, would you pay the manufacturer the $30,000 to just remove the governor, or would you personally go in there and rip the damned thing out yourself to give you the $50,000 value?

That is really all this is, a limiter that has been put into a product to limit performance, and they want you to pay extra to remove that limiter. That is a very different thing than buying something for a lower cost that doesn't have the features and functionality already there, just waiting for a TINY signal to provide the functionality. Or, picture if EVERY SINGLE CAR had built in GPS, automatic parallel parking(with all the sensors already installed on the car), backup camera, side proximity detectors, etc, yet you had to pay extra to turn on each individual feature. Would you pay an extra $10,000 to turn on features that are already there, or would you look for a way to turn the features on without paying the money?

When you buy a CPU, it is certified to operate properly at a given speed, and if you get a higher end CPU from AMD(a Black Edition chip), it comes unlocked, so you don't have to pay extra to overclock it. It may still have a "normal speed" selection, but it is fully unlocked to its capabilities. No one objects to having their CPU locked as much as being told that "to get the full potential of your purchase, you have to pay extra". If you buy a house and half of it has been bricked up to prevent you from using it, and the brick wall will only be removed if you pay the seller extra money, that would seem pretty screwed up, wouldn't it?

Re:disgusting

[Targon]

Software is very different from hardware. It is expected that the hardware is limited due to hardware limitations, rather than by some fake limitation placed there to get more money out of you.

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know most car companies do this now, right? A lot sell a performance upgrade that's just a reflash of the ecu with more tuned fuel maps and timing curves. Others do it for other systems as well. Buy a GM, and you can find after market back up cameras, xm/Sirius units and all that that will plug right into the head unit. BUT unless the feature capability is already unlocked in the head unit by the dealership or when it was produced, the add-on wont work. To get the add on sat radio to work, if the feature is locked out, requires a trip to the dealership who can unlock it with their computer.

So its essentially the same deal. While the radio supports it, they lock it out so you can just go adding an after market adaptor, but are pressured to get the over priced OEM part. One reason having good relations with local dealerships is a plus/must for those in the mobile electronics industry

Re:disgusting

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sorry the relation to this and the automotive industry is bugging. In the automotive industry the upgrades almost always involve the addition of hardware, although the infrastructure is actually present for the upgrade most of the time. Let’s say you want to add ABS to a vehicle without ABS it is not as simple as just going into a module and adding it, there are many hardware items that would need to be added in order to make it function. This is like saying I have a standard radio and now I want one with GPS so let me do a software update and it will all work now, and with a wave of the magic wand I suddenly have a touch screen from a software upgrade. For the sake of argument let’s take the heated seats point into consideration as well, the wiring harness may be the same in order to lower production costs but the module, switches and heating elements are not present in order for this to be a simple upgrade. Also in the long run some of this using the same wiring harness practice can cause trouble when the unused connectors are introduced to moisture and the like causing shorts and in the end result shorting modules or even causing a fire.

Glad I bought AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, so I got a tri-core which was actually manufactured as a quad-core, but at least the fourth core was actually buggered to necessitate it's being disabled.

Re:Glad I bought AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

And if that triple core you bought actually has a working core (the Phenom II/AMD's 45nm CPU's have been out for 2 years now, they can't have that many defective cores anymore), you can just go into the BIOS and enable a setting to get that 4th core.

Evolving to FPGA

[Doc Ruby]

Intel now sells Atom CPUs, with embedded FPGA. Xilinx, the top FPGA maker, offers ARM CPUs with embedded FPGA. Both CPU lines run Linux now.

FPGA is logic gates, the building blocks of CPUs (and other computing chips) that can be interconnected on demand to create different logic circuits - and therefore custom instructions. Logic implemented in FPGA on a CPU can be revised by over-the-network software upgrades. FPGA was typically used by chip designers to develop candidate designs to be burned into hardware, but has become cheap and fast enough to distribute as end-product "reconfigurable computing" devices.

Imagine your multimedia codecs configured directly into logic circuits on the CPU. They'd be really fast, and lower power than moving data across the CPU/RAM/bus boundaries. Upgrades by SW, just like now. Load/unload them as circuits on demand rather than as instruction codes in banks of RAM. Bring the network wires to FPGA pins on the CPU, and the data can route to codec processors on the chip for parallel operation. Of course these features apply to any "media" data, including business data in streams or large datasets.

Intel's move to SW upgrades of CPU microcode is creating the tech and business infrastructure for regular FPGA upgrades to these new hybrids. Soon enough the literally hardwired CPU logic might become the minority of the chip. Already FPGAs with embedded DSPs are like that, so a chip that's mostly FPGA with just some ALU and CLU circuits already optimized to close to their theoretical performance (in speed or power) are foreseeable.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Anonymous Coward]

The critical path on an FPGA would be too long for one to replace a traditional processor.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Doc Ruby]

Please specify what you mean by "the critical path". You mean from opcode loading to final data storage? As I said, the mundane and fully optimized circuits will probably remain in permanent HW. But most of the logic in a program will gradually be executed in reconfigurable gates in FPGA. Even if they do link to fully optimized parallel units, including instruction decoders and MAC machines.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[graveyhead]

Yeah I was going to post something similar. You don't get to just build an MPEG 4 decoder in an FPGA and "voila, instant hardware decoder". The biggest FPGAs only have a few million or so gates, it wouldn't fit and would have to be still mostly driven by software. You'd put the most CPU intensive pieces into the FPGA and do the rest through the step / instruction cycles of a processor.

I'd actually argue that NVidia type coprocessors are much more appropriate for the types of tasks you mention. They have multiple concurrent pipelines, access to hardware multipliers and are readily configurable by shader language, OpenCL, CUDA, etc.

You could of course build something similar inside an FPGA, but on an NV we're talking billions of gates. The FPGA would be much smaller, maybe you'd fit one programmable pipeline.

FPGAs are great for prototyping but nothing compares to what you can lay down manually on silicon.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Kwesadilo]

Intel's move to SW upgrades of CPU microcode is creating the tech and business infrastructure for regular FPGA upgrades to these new hybrids.

Not to mention undetectable, CPU-resident malware. Yeesh. If FPGAs get cheaper to manufacture and program in huge quantities than regular non-reprogrammable hardware, then sure, use them. But don't make the whole freaking CPU reprogrammable via software running on that CPU. That's going to be nasty. Think AESDEC becomes AESDEC and copy the key material off to somewhere shady.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's more likely that people will just hack their BIOS to treat these processors as the upgrade model, chipid be damned.

If these updates are really changing fuses so that disabled functionality is enabled, it would have to be permanent. So therein lies the question, does the upgrade do a permanent change to the CPU, or just a cosmetic change so that the BIOS sees a different cpuid.

As for "Intel is selling a 200$ chip with stuff disabled" vs "Intel is selling a 400$ chip with stuff disabled as a 200$ chip", you can tell the GPLv3 zealots who think software piracy is a good thing from the less insane people who see nothing wrong with other licences.

The people who are seeing "200$ chip with stuff disabled" are the people who see the glass half empty, that they are being ripped off on purpose because Intel's a dick.
The people who are seeing "400$ chip with stuff disabled, sold at 200$" are the people who see the glass half full, and don't see anything wrong with this.

A software binning is much preferable to hardware binning, as it does potentially enable additional performance, but opens up a pandoras box of software also being able to trash the CPU, which is what I'd be more worried about.

It begs the question of the possibility of re-binning the lowest performing part to the highest performing part. Not just the one-step upgrade as seen on the Intel marketing materials.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[dtdmrr]

All the early MPEG 4 accelerators I saw were implemented in FPGAs. Of course much of that was encoders instead of decoders, since that is the harder problem. Now you can buy cheap mpeg 4 asic/ip core accelerators. Those are still going to be much more energy efficient than using the array of general cores on a GPU.

As for implementing GPU pipelines on FPGAs, it has been done: http://hackaday.com/2008/05/21/open-graphics-card-available-for-preorder/ I'm sure I've seen other research projects or maybe just people screwing around and implementing GPU pipelines "because we can". Its also a convenient solution for educational purposes. But no, if you want to make an efficient GPU for general use, it does not make sense to map GPU logic onto the FPGA fabric. You would loose on the order of an order of magnitude in clock speed, and doing it that way you completely toss away the positive benefits of the FPGA architecture.

I think you might have a skewed impression of how complex mpeg4 encoding and decoding is, and how much area it consumes. Also in the comparison of FPGA logic cells and "gates" in a GPU is a bit faulty. In terms of raw transistor count the largest FPGAs tend to be a little ahead. That "million" or so logic elements in a FPGA does not translate to simple logic gates or transistors. The logic cells are multiple input lookup tables that are used to evaluate arbitrary boolean functions. How many traditional gates can you replace with a single 4 input lookup table? What about an 8 input LUT? The answer does depend on the logic you are mapping, but its almost never a 1:1 mapping.

Also FPGAs do have ram, fixed logic cores (dsp blocks/multipliers, etc), and even conventional processor cores. While its true that however big the array, someone will have a problem that won't fit, you can put an awful lot on a modern FPGA.

As for your final thought about fixed silicon. Not necessarily, look at this fellow's research: http://cas.ee.ic.ac.uk/people/nachiket/ He goes into why CPUs and GPUs are slow for running SPICE circuit simulations. Despite running at a fraction of the clock speed, his FPGA implementation completes the simulations faster and consumes much less power than the CPU or GPU. True a fixed logic accelerator specifically designed to implement the algorithm would be faster, but how many special purpose fixed accelerators do you want to put on your chip? What if the implementation can benefit from dynamically adapting to the current problem? Sometimes it really is more efficient to provide reconfigurable logic and load in the best implementation you have for each problem. Dynamic hardware acceleration is likely one of the reasons intel is producing Atom-FPGA combos. There are ongoing research projects examining the benefits for mobile computing devices. Transistors are cheap, but people want to use cell phones for all sorts of strange things, and there's always something new on the horizon.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Doc Ruby]

It's going to happen, since it's already happening and the benefits will only increase as it happens more. "Permanent circuits" are going to become one more security assumption that cannot be made a basis of trust or reliability. Which is yet another reason that SW and data security techniques and practices must be made ever more comprehensive and practicable.

The future of infosystem security is inevitably going to be nasty. It's up to those securing it to be nastier than those attacking it.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Doc Ruby]

I think you replied to the wrong comment, since to mine yours is a non sequitur.

You should also login with a username, since "Anonymous Coward" posts weaken your argument.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[mako1138]

I don't see this happening anytime soon. FPGA performance is nowhere near the $/performance ratio that would make sense for the consumer sector. Right now, FPGAs are doing what they've been doing for quite some time: custom logic or glue logic. I see the Atom+FPGA products as aimed toward the embedded space, where applications can benefit from hardware-deterministic timing and customizable interface logic; definitely not for number-crunching purposes.

And in general, FPGAs are only good at very repetitive tasks that can be effectively pipelined. You might have 600MHz performance on paper, but once your design gets complex, the on-chip routing starts to get taxed and becomes the bottleneck. Every successive generation of FPGAs improves on both logic and interconnect, but price/performance ratio and the limited number of applications preclude widespread adoption. And in the meantime, conventional CPUs and GPUs will continue to improve.

Re:Evolving to FPGA

[Doc Ruby]

The Zynq-7000 CPUs from Xilinx put a 500-1000MHz multicore ARM-C9 on a die highly interconnected by an AMBA bus to a large, fast FPGA fabric. For something like $20-50. The $:performance ratio just dropped. I saw this happen with DSPs in 1989-90, and it took quite a lot of people by surprise.

One of the top scientists at Xilinx was one of the founders of a company harnessing the DSP price drop where I worked. We also used the earliest FPGAs, but it's taken decades for the industry to get to the watershed it's just crossed with these new Intel and Xilinx CPUs. Largely because parallel processing is hard, but also because there's been so much lower hanging fruit for FPGA to consume first. But now the "FPGA peripheral" is here.

Linux on Zynq will include some IP cores for the FPGA right from the start. But very quickly developers will carve functions out of the Linux SW and instantiate them in FPGA, then call the FPGA instead. Likewise for Linux apps. Gradually versions of Linux will be distributed that have a lot of the performance bottlenecks ported from sequential instructions on the Atom/ARM to libraries implemented in the FPGA. As more SW is ported to HW, other developers will find optimizations in common configurations (eg. Linux + Chrome + LibreOffice + Google Apps/Docs) that keep the FPGA pipelines full more of the available time. The benefits will come in parallel media processing, upgradeable high-quality codecs, and higher bandwidth IPC.

Yes, conventional CPUs and GPUs will also continue to improve. But their techniques will cross pollinate CPU/FPGA hybrids, which can adopt all the CPU and GPU techniques into their more flexible HW. Likewise FPGA will augment "straight" CPUs, like onchip interconnects between memory and functional blocks that are better routed different ways for different simultaneous applications. And GPUs will benefit even more from some FPGA, with instructions customized for specific profiles of pixels, textures or vertex lists data. All processors will become more reconfigurable. They probably won't converge into an all FPGA platform, or even a single or small group of "universal CPU/FPGA/DSP" chips. There will be diversity of permanent HW instances to match the increasing diversity of tasks to which they're applied.

But FPGA embedded on mainstream chips like Atom and ARM will make FPGA techniques part of mainstream programming. It will no longer be a specialty of "HW engineers". While these hybrids will be programmable in sequential OOP like Java and C++, their features will also influence OOP into more topological statements of programs. Likely the rise of RDBMS programming, like the integration of SQLite into Android and its apps, will further influence programming into an object/relational/graph programming paradigm. The HW always leads, and developers find new (usually recombined) styles of telling the HW what to do. With FPGA easily available to regular developers, and an evolutionary path for porting existing SW to it for further improvement in the FPGA domain, that innovation is now unblocked. The rest will flow as quickly as new generations of computing always have.

Like a firmware upgrade

[Russ1642]

Since everybody's doing firmware upgrades for devices such as mp3 players and optical drives it isn't a big shock that major chip makers are getting into it. I probably don't understand operating systems enough but I still have to ask why this isn't dealt with in driver updates? Anyway, doesn't look like a big deal to me and very few people are going to go through with this. I never saw anything that said you had to pay for this upgrade.

Re:Like a firmware upgrade

[taxman_10m]

I've never be charged for a firmware upgrade to my Sansa Mp3 player.

Re:Like a firmware upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

to figure out it's free you need to RTFA

Re:Like a firmware upgrade

[hedwards]

You'd be an idiot to pay even if they did. My Sansa is running Rockbox. Which reminds me that there's probably an update for that out by now.

Re:Like a firmware upgrade

[taxman_10m]

I had no idea the Clip+ was supported. Thanks.

Re:Like a firmware upgrade

[hedwards]

That wasn't my point, but regardless glad to be of assistance.

They seem to still be in active development adding support for new hardware over time.

cpu soft upgrade bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Sell you a crippled chip the charge you to fix it.
Be sure to give a reach around next time you fuck me in the ass / wallet.

DRM for processor!

[Lead Butthead]

Wait till it start corrupting data on "cracked" processors as a form of DRM.

Re:DRM for processor!

[the_humeister]

It's called the "Pentium FPU bug"

Re:Overclocking is bad, unless you pay us more fir

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just don't pay them anything and pirate the software upgrade.

Free

[Anonymous Coward]

It's free. Stop panicking.

Re:Free

[taxman_10m]

No, you need to purchase an upgrade card.

Same as Windows . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no different from Windows 7 or Windows Vista, where every SKU is part of the image and you can switch versions through a product key. Essentially what they're doing is regulating access to intellectual property. I'm not saying whether it's right or not - but it is already fairly standard.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[taxman_10m]

I dunno. I'm looking at it as if I bought a desktop computer that has 4 gigs of ram inside, but reports only 3 gig. Then dell sells me an upgrade that turns on the 4th gig.

Seems sleazy and wrong to me.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[Sepodati]

So long as you were only charged for 3 gig in the beginning, what's the problem here? You got what you paid for, which is exactly the case with these processors.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

But here's the thing -- you're paying for 3 GB of RAM to begin with, not 4. Between a computer with a physical 3GB of RAM and the computer from Dell you described is that you can upgrade much easier* on that Dell than you would a computer 3GB physical RAM.

*Easier for someone who doesn't what the hell they're doing.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[MysteriousPreacher]

How us it wrong if, to use your analogy, the computer was clearly labelled as bring only able go address 3 gigabytes of memory? It would be sn entirely different matter if they had sold the machine as having 4 gigs, while neglecting to mention that an additional payment is required to get the last gig.

This Intel thing doesn't trouble. If I buy a 2.67 processor, and it runs at the advertised clock rate the I have what I paid paid for. The fact that the chip can go faster is immaterial.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[AngryDeuce]

It is sleazy, but it ain't wrong....then again, neither is playing around with the software and turning on that extra gig yourself.

If they don't like it, well, boo freaking hoo...shouldn't have sold me a computer with an extra gig of ram on the board. Better luck next time.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[AngryDeuce]

The fact that the chip can go faster is immaterial.

Of course, as is Intel's opinion of me overclocking a chick I gave them money for already. If they didn't want me running a 2 GHz chip at 3 GHz, they probably shouldn't have sold me a 2 GHz chip capable of running at that speed. They made that choice, not me, because that choice saves them money and allows them to pass that savings along to...wait a minute, they're not passing that savings along to anyone, because the price of the product is artificial and not tied to anything tangible whatsoever. That's okay, though, you can use your chips at whatever speed you want.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[Arker]

You arent paying for only 3gb to begin with though. Guaranteed. The manufacturer paid for the 4th gb and therefore is absolutely certain to pass that cost on to you. So you paid for 4gb, then they want to get paid a second time to actually let you use it. Sleezy at best.

Re:Same as Windows . . .

[lgarner]

If they said "You can overclock this to 3GHz" then you're perfectly entitled to do so and should be upset if you can't. If it's sold as "2GHZ, period," then what it's actually capable of is immaterial. You might be able to overclock it, you might not. It might work, it might burn up. Either way, not Intel's problem since the product was clearly labelled.

...the price of the product is artificial...

No, it's tied to its worth, which is determined by what people will pay. In a duopoly it's not quite as fluid as say white-box PC manufacture, but you still have a choice between the cost of the chip and its capabilities. Some people here seem to want to slap their foreheads, say "Wow! I coulda had a V-8", and have Intel give them a free V-8 even though they chose something else previously.

was wondering about the 2nd gen i5 in my laptop

[taxman_10m]

When I got the new laptop it didn't seem as responsive as I thought it should be. Maybe I was right. They gave me a crippled CPU that I need to unlock the performance on? "Increasing the cache" sounds like a totally bogus upgrade btw. I'm going to be pretty pissed knowing that the full cache wasn't being used on the machine I bought.

Re:was wondering about the 2nd gen i5 in my laptop

[Sepodati]

Seeing as this if for i3 processors only, you're full of crap.

Re:was wondering about the 2nd gen i5 in my laptop

[taxman_10m]

That isn't how I read it. This is being rolled out for i3 processors first.

And just when I was starting to like Intel

[Anonymous Coward]

People need to complain loudly about this, so companies don't think it's a good idea and keep doing it.

It's double-dipping. Physical hardware goods should not be upgrade-able through software. Intel is making parts that it can sell for a profit at the lower price, and intentionally cripple it. It's not like it's costing them more to make parts with better performance. Then they want to double-dip for some more cash to make it run like they made it to run.

It's not like this to allow trial-use, with the full thing being unlockable. It's artificially creating product tiers for the sole purpose of profit maximization. They're artificially adjusting the price to make profit; that's pretty much the definition of monopolistic behavior, adjusting price and production to the profit-maximizing point and away from the "efficient" price/production point. Computer too slow? Don't buy a new one yet, buy the software upgrade! Pay twice for the same thing, instead of buying a new chip.

On the other hand, if they did just release these things at full performance and the same price - where they're ostensibly turning a profit anyway - they would probably destroy AMD. Intel parts are already generally higher performing. Intel could increase the performance and keep the price points the same, and suddenly AMD as a "value" proposition doesn't look as good.

But just genuinely being better than your competition would probably be decried as anti-competitive. Instead, we leverage market share and marketing to provide an attractive and easy quick-fix for computer speed woes. It makes it easy for consumers to upgrade, and without being technically difficult. Instant cash, which will just further solidify their spot as the primary logic chip maker.

Which is worse? Destroying the competition, or the government not allowing the destruction of the competition, resulting in a fleecing of the consumers and no change in the status quo of the makers?

Re:And just when I was starting to like Intel

[Calos]

Oops, forgot to log in. I'm the AC above.

Re:And just when I was starting to like Intel

[taxman_10m]

That's an interesting motive about keeping AMD afloat through artificial means. Someone mod this guy up.

Re:And just when I was starting to like Intel

[Sepodati]

I don't want the only processor option to be the $500 top of the line model. I'm willing to pay $100 or $200 for a processor with that level of functionality. If you want $500 functionality, buy the $500 product. The manufacturing process facilitates the design of a single chip that's latter modified to create a performance level matching its price.

Re:And just when I was starting to like Intel

[Calos]

But that's the point - they're doing extra work to make a worse product. They could sell the $500 part for $200 because it's the same part. It's not like they're subsidizing the $200 part, making a loss on it.

Go AMD!

[darkmeridian]

I think I'm going to pick up their new Bulldozer when it comes out. Intel makes great processors but these shenanigans have got to stop.

Re:Go AMD!

[xigxag]

I think I'm going to pick up their new Bulldozer when it comes out. Intel makes great processors but these shenanigans have got to stop.

What shenanigans?

Except for the CPUs at the very top of their respective product lines, ALL processors are crippled. Compared to the i7, the i3 is just a permanently gimped chip. But its wasteful, both from a manufacturing perspective and from a user perspective, to make physically different chips. It's more efficient to make the low end chip upgradable through software. Fewer physical chip lines result in lower manufacturing costs which can then be passed on to the consumer or shareholder. It also results in lower upgrade costs for the end user, who doesn't have to actually pay for the shipping, delivery, and installation of a new chip. So this is a win-win. Except for people who think all software should be free and therefore feel ripped off at having to pay for additional functionality. I mean, any piece of software, even say Photoshop or Crysis2, is just "unlocking" the capability that your computer already in principle possesses. Why should you have to pay for that, amirite?

Re:Go AMD!

[maxwell demon]

No, normal software doesn't unlock hardware, it utilizes it. You don't get e.g. more L3 cache by downloading Photoshop.
And yes, in theory you could write your own version of Photoshop. It's just very much work. However I can't write software which increases my L3 cache.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly all software is theoritical possibilities.
Thank you for making me feel better about never paying for software or media ever again. (and giving legal grounds for it too)

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh its wastefull you say?
Then all those cpu's that don't fit the full software upgrade will end up where?
Seems this will only increase wastefullness.

I know what won't be wastefull, my money on intel bullshit.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, Intel is charging for what you can already do on AMD platforms for free. Overclocking and potentially unlocking CPU cores, that is.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically this means that there is little pressure from AMD in the area of performance and Intel improved their yields to the point that they have to "downclock" the CPUs to sell them at competitive price points. This is basically a mean to "upsell" the existing customers without delivering anything new to them. It is money for nothing and extracting an extra profit out of the performance lead over AMD. Not very ethical but hey it is a business and I am sure there going to be a market for this kind of service.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a car that is capable of 220KPH, but as it was sold in Japan, is gimped and will only do 180KPH because of the engine management (and probably the speed rating on the stock tyres). However, our road rules also gimp the performance of the car, as over 160KPH I could get enough demerit points to loose my licence (and pick up a dangerous driving charge) and more than 110KPH would seriously inconvenience my wallet 8)

Re:Go AMD!

[Ambient Sheep]

However I can't write software which increases my L3 cache.

You can now! ;-p

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you an Industry Flack ?

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

At least in the past, not all products were purposely crippled. It is inherent to the manufacturing process that not all dies are perfect. Say one die has a faulty core and does not run at the full clock - just sell it as an i3 with a lower price. I think the issue Intel is having is that the manufacturing process is becoming better and better such that the "natural i3" processors do not manifest the wafer, and most chips can operate at higher spec, like i5/i7. As a result they are artificially reducing the potential (crippling) of certain dies so that they can sell to more markets and optimize revenue (gosh they are a business looking to make money after all).

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

>any piece of software, even say Photoshop or Crysis2, is just "unlocking" the capability that your computer already in principle possesses

No. When you buy a computer, you do not buy a box containing finite amount of features. You do that when you buy a conventional (ie. non-smart) music player or phone. The features are already there and for most intents and purposes they are non-flexible (firmware). When you buy a computer you buy a box containing finite amount of raw power (hardware) that has to be shaped in some way to use it. The software is the tool to shape this raw power, just like you would use a chisel or ice pick to shape a wood block.

What Intel does, they sell you a box with a "false bottom". The visible layer contains 12 units of raw power while under the false bottom there is 4 more units of raw power. To the user this translates as "12 features with 4 more if you buy the premium upgrade card". This is NOT innovative, this is like in this comment: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2379110&cid=37085954 . They sell crippled stuff and then demand more cash to uncripple it. I'm not going to say it's evil, because that's not (compared to some people throughout the history of humankind). What I am going to say is that it is a bad practice, damaging trend for the market and the future of computing (want to pay $70 for the privilege of using non-Windows OS? No? How about $30 for unlocking access to 3D acceleration or $50 for unlocking HD display support?) and plain respectless. It's a digital equivalent of spitting on someone and charging for a tissue to wipe your face with.

With Intel pulling this kind of stuff on people, I'm going AMD. I'm going to avoid them as much as I can until they start taking people with IQ higher than 40 seriously. I just really hope AMD won't join in as well.

CAPTCHA: flushing. How appropriate.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's wasteful ? And damaging a perfectly good chip isn't ? Something is severely wrong with our world.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that they are selling the exact same chip for two different prices. This isnt like they are testing a chip and finding out that it doesnt work up to spec but it still can function at a lower requirement. This is taking a perfectly good chip, then adding additional cost by adding an artificial limiter.

I sat here 5 minutes trying to come up with an analogy but there isnt one because in any other business, this is just plain stupid. “Wait, you want to sell me this eco version of a car which is just the same car but with a brick glued under the gas pedal? But it’s ok, because if I decide later that I want to be able to accelerate faster later, I can come back to the shop and pay you guys $200 to remove the brick?”

Re:Go AMD!

[Antisyzygy]

No, you aren't right. If manufacturing costs are cheaper to produce a bunch of 300 dollar CPU's than to produce 200 dollar CPU's and 300 dollar CPU's, the cost should drop for the consumer if you just produce 300 dollar CPU's and Intel's profits should also go up since they don't have to spend additional capital on producing 200 dollar CPU's. What they essentially are doing is producing a bunch of 300 dollar CPU's, disabling features with software, and selling them for 200 dollars. Then, you can unlock the 300 dollar CPU by paying the extra 100 bucks. What really should be happening, is that the 300 dollar CPU should now cost 250 dollars since its cheaper to make and there are more of them. Its artificial market segmentation, and its based on squeezing more cash out of consumers so that the shareholders are happier. Its anti-consumer based in greed, and this sort of shit is why America's economy is in the shitter. Too much money flowing into too few hands while the rest gets bled out to overseas manufacturing.

Re:Go AMD!

[xigxag]

The problem is that they are selling the exact same chip for two different prices. This isnt like they are testing a chip and finding out that it doesnt work up to spec but it still can function at a lower requirement. This is taking a perfectly good chip, then adding additional cost by adding an artificial limiter.

It's not the "same exact chip." As you say yourself, it has a limiter. But they're not ADDING additional cost, they're removing it. The limiter allows for market differentiation. I think the objection that most people have here is visceral and not necessarily based upon reason. Consider the following thought experiment.

Xintel sells the XXX1 chip for $200. It runs at 2.5 GHz and has a 4MB cache.
They sell the XXX2 chip for $250. It runs at 3.2 GHz, has an 8MB cache, and overall runs 25% faster than the XXX1
They also run a program whereby they will sell you a chip upgrade, by having you ship your PC to Xintel, they uninstall the XXX1 and replace it with an XXX2. It takes about 2 weeks, and the total upgrade costs $100, more if you want insurance.

Yintel sells the YYY1 chip for $200 which also runs at 2.5 GHz and has a 4MB cache.
However, they can upgrade their chip via software to a YYY2 which has the higher speed and cache of the XXX2 The total upgrade is $80, is completed in 10 minutes, and don't have to worry about your machine coming back damaged from the factory. Despite the slightly lower cost to the consumer, Yintel also makes more money on the deal because by producing one chip instead of two, they have less packaging, retooling, don't have to pay a technician, etc. Yet the argument seems to be that the Yintel is somehow a rip-off because their chip is "artificially" limited?

In that case, consider a third chip manufacturer.

Zintel will also upgrade their $200 ZZZ1 chip (functionally equivalent to the XXX1) to the $250 ZZZ2 chip, also for a $100 upgrade fee, just like the Xintel deal. And just like Xintel, you ship it to the factory, and wait two weeks for it to come back. Except, totally unbeknown to you, at the factory they don't actually uninstall the chip, they just run their little software program and unlock the hidden capabilities of the chip that you did not know about. From your perspective, it looks exactly as if they physically replaced the chip, and you are none the wiser. So now, is ignorance bliss?

"You're missing the point," you might say. "Instead of selling me a gimped chip, they should just sell it to me unlocked to begin with." The answer is, they do. For $250. But if you only want to pay $200, you're going to get a less functional model. Hardware or software limited, makes no difference, is my argument.

Now, regarding your car analogy, how is that a bad thing? Obviously it wouldn't be a literal brick, but imagine if they sold the same exact vehicle with a 120 mph max speed, or with an 85 mph max speed artificially limited, and the second retailed for $1000.00 cheaper. Can't you imagine that there would be a market for buying the same make vehicle that was a little bit slower? And then later, the buyer gets a letter saying that GM will unlock the speed limiter remotely for $1250.00, no need to even take it into the shop. You're arguing that the buyer would be ripped off here because GM is giving them a post-sale option that they otherwise would not have?

I could seriously see this catching hold elsewhere. You buy a 60 Mhz TV for $500. Upgrade it online to 240Mhz for $100 or unlock 3D for another $400. Why would someone go for a deal like this? There are a lot of people who simply can't afford a $1000 TV *right now* but think they might be able to do so in the future. Or maybe they think if they buy the $500 TV, the price will eventually come down on the upgrade -- if they wait a couple of years, they'll be able to get it for $300 more. Meanwhile, they've enjoyed their TV as is until the upgrade becomes affordable.

Re:Go AMD!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I mean, any piece of software, even say Photoshop or Crysis2, is just "unlocking" the capability that your computer already in principle possesses.

You're joking, right? That's the worst analogy in the history of Slashdot.

Also, you say we should accept X, because companies are already doing Y.

The main problem with paying to unlock features is that you *know* Intel is not going to sell the locked version at a loss, hoping you'll upgrade. They're making all their money on the development, manufacturing, and silicon up front... Then trying to get even more money from you for something you already paid for later.

So what ?

[Arlet]

If their price is good for either the standard, or for the upgraded version, I couldn't care less how it's done.

Aw, man

[zerox030366]

I was just considering switching from AMD to Intel on my next build. I am really not excited at all about the new APU processors that AMD is coming out with, and sadly the Phenom II is still behind Intel's Sandy Bridge... But I just want Intel to know that I will never accept this kind of crap and that I will now buy AMD with the certainty that I have made the right decision.

Re:Aw, man

[Sepodati]

lol... and you really think that tri-core Phenom isn't just a quad-core with a non-functioning or disabled core? You pay tri-core prices for tri-core functionality. You're not getting screwed in either scenario here (well... with regards to enabled/disabled features).

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Phenom-X3-8750-TriCore-Processor/

Re:Aw, man

[zerox030366]

Wrong, you're getting screwed in both scenarios. Sure, you pay less for the one with lower functionality, but that just means that they can afford to sell their products at much lower prices and still turn a profit. Guess I'll just have to build my own processor out of transistors...

Re:Aw, man

[Sepodati]

I don't disagree with that, but who determines what the right amount of profit is? Obviously there's a market for tri and quad-core processors at the current prices.

Re:Aw, man

[zerox030366]

Yeah, that is true. I know that they are corporations and that it is their job to make money, but why do they have to do it in ways which make it so obvious that they're screwing you over?

Quite sometime

[PixetaledPikachu]

This has been going on for quite sometime in enterprise world, well sort of. Although not quite the same, Citrix's NetScaler box can be "upgraded" via license purchase. This usually increases throughput and the number of allowed SSL sessions. IBM also sells their P-series server in quite similar manner. They will ship the box with all sockets filled with processors, but only enable the ones that you purchase. If you require additional processors, you will have to pay IBM to enable more processor. In the end, you still get what your money worth. I never consider an overclockability as a feature, I treat it more like a bonus. And if Intel or AMD decides to stop giving bonus, that's fine for me

Re:Quite sometime

[Anonymous Coward]

Microcontroller manufacturers do the same thing, albeit without the option for an upgrade. When I buy that 32-pin part instead of the 64-pin part, I'm still getting the same chip off the same die, but that extra SPI bus and handful of GPIOs simply aren't routed out on the smaller package part. The smaller part has nearly the same manufacturing cost as the larger part, but the chip manufacture is willing to sell me (effectively) the same part at a lower price in order to get more sales out of a single design.

Re:Quite sometime

[isopropanol]

Except with uControllers people specifically want the smaller package part because it's smaller. With the CPU they are just ripping you off, unless it's for thermal reasons.

Re:Quite sometime

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never been involved in a design using a 8-bit uC where size of the chip is more important that the price of the chip. But you just go ahead and make poor rationalizations for the sake of being mad about trivial things.

Re:Quite sometime

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that's funny, I've heard a few stories about chip manufacturers using the pulldown on one of those 'reserved' pins to enable or disable a whole 'nother chips (much more expensive!) functionality off the same die. In one case having had a shipment of the lower end part sent out and working perfectly in place of the higher end part. Needless to say, it wasn't good relations between the parties involved.

Re:Quite sometime

[Anonymous Coward]

The bonus is still there. It's just that now you have to pay for it and not get it for free like it happened in the past.

Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[taxman_10m]

It seems they want to build in a revenue stream so I wonder if they will be rolling out additional upgrades. So you buy this upgrade now, but in 3 months there will be an additional upgrade to increase performance another 10%.

It's like the DLC for games model. Buy the game. A few months later buy the DLC. A few months after that buy DLC #2, etc...

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[ThorGod]

I accidentally moderated you "overrated" when I meant to moderate you as "funny". Sorry! At least this post will remove all mods I've done here...

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[vlm]

It seems they want to build in a revenue stream so I wonder if they will be rolling out additional upgrades. So you buy this upgrade now, but in 3 months there will be an additional upgrade to increase performance another 10%.

It's like the DLC for games model. Buy the game. A few months later buy the DLC. A few months after that buy DLC #2, etc...

More like subscription model. Pay $50 for a one year upgrade... or else. Technically meets minimum speed requirements for booting windows, but if you want to actually "use" the computer you have to pay an arbitrary yearly / monthly / daily fee.

If you don't like that business model, that's OK, because there's a free market so you can switch to any commodity processor manufacturer... oh snap...

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[taxman_10m]

You are right, that's more like it. It mystifies that there are people on Slashdot who are supportive of this. Intel or whoever has an incentive to sell you a barely functional mystery box. You only find out what you actually bought as they decide to roll out new features and upgrades.

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[Arlet]

You make no sense. If you buy a cheaper model, you know exactly what you have. All the specs are available, and you can compare the price/performance to hundreds of other options. If you like it, you buy it. If you don't like it, you don't.

This stuff has been going on forever, except that's it's usually done by crippling a product in hardware, rather than software. Does that make it any better ? I doubt it. Hardware based crippling is likely to cost more overall, which means higher prices for the end user.

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[luther349]

i refuse to do dlc on games. i just wait for the game of the year edition that has all the dlc and normally half the price it was when it was retail. or buy games with free dlc.

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[Anonymous Coward]

They know during the testing the frequency the chip will run. They are downclocking the CPU because of marketing goals. All model steps between marked down frequency and actual frequency will be available for purchase. I would guess that the price of the upgrade might change over the time and the top level model available for upgrade might change but other than that there is nothing more to get. They already sold customer the CPU. All they are doing is sanctioning overclocking .

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[PixelJaded]

Bizarrely, they do have to build a revenue stream. You can't invest billions of dollars in research and billions of dollars in Fabs that quickly go out of date if you don't have a revenue stream. That's why they've always crippled the chips in software (or AMD laser etching contacts and other schemes to configure chips post-production).

Intel's profitability is mostly determined by how successfully they create value. If they can build a better chip than AMD, because they invested more money in research, then yes they can charge a higher price for it. If they do this in the long run, rather than crippling the company chasing short term profits, then they will acquire economies of scale because their leading technology position will (hopefully) hand them a leading market position.

You could argue AMD is evil for under-investing in research, or over-charging for CPUs, since AMDs CPUs are often offering you less performance at the same price. If they were you wouldn't even care that Intel was offering software upgrades because you'd only be buying AMD CPUs.

Similarly, the DLC mentality in games is partly driven by the rising cost of building games. Many games now involve a team of 100+ people working for multiple years full-time. By contrast, many popular games of the past were created by one person in 6 months.

Fortunately, due to economies of scale in the game market, you can now choose to buy new $10 games that two person built in two years through Steam / XBLA / PSN / Wii Shop, or you can choose to buy $90 games with $120 of optional expansion packs created by dozens of people over several years. You can also buy past hits that you missed (sega classics, etc.) for $1-5 a pop, a tiny fraction of what people 10-20 years ago had to pay for the exact same game.

Both gamers and CPU purchasers have never had it so good thanks to past R&D investment by companies selling amazing products at low prices. Contrast that with home buyers if you want to see financial manipulation and greed.

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[Antisyzygy]

Not really the same at all. DLC is new, additional content. This software for Intel CPUs does not increase the functionality by adding something new, it unlocks pre-existing functionality. So what Intel is doing is selling you a fully functional CPU, then disabling some cores, or reducing its speed artificially. Then they charge you extra to unlock extra cores or speed that the CPU was already capable of doing.

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[Antisyzygy]

If you don't like that business model, that's OK, because there's a free market so you can switch to any commodity processor manufacturer... oh snap...

The only other option is AMD or VIA. You would have to be an idiot to use VIA since they make shitty hardware. Thats not a really free market dude.

Re:Will they offer an upgrade to the upgrade?

[Antisyzygy]

It should be lower prices for the end user. If you produce more higher priced chips, the manufacturing cost goes down and the supply goes up. If the demand remains the same, the prices should drop for the consumer. What Intel is doing is artificial market segmentation so they can squeeze you for more profit.

How much?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see people feeling ripped off by Intel on this, but how much do they actually sell this upgrade? I can't find that anywhere.

It's actually a discount

[l2718]

Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.

I think you don't understand what's going on. Intel is giving everyone more options. There's no way this can make you worse off. You probably don't realize that Intel doesn't make separate "1.8 GHz" and "2.0 GHz" chips. What they do is make many of the same chip, test each chip, and then set the clock frequency depending on how well each chip handles things. Now imagine many people would rather buy a 1.8GHz chip (it's cheaper and they don't need the extra speed), but the manufacturing process is good and makes mostly 2.0Ghz chips. Intel now has three choices:

1. Keep things as they are. This makes 1.8GHz chips more expensive (supply is less than demand at the current price), and forces people to buy 2.0GHz chips they don't want.
2. Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.
3. Take some chips that could run at 2.0GHz, mark them "1.8GHz" and sell them for a lower price.

Under the last scenario Intel is happier (they got the money of the people who want cheaper parts and got to charge a premium from the people who want faster parts). The consumers are also happier (they got the processor speed they want at the price they want). Why should the people who wanted 1.8GHz speed care that the part they got could in theory run at 2.0GHz? that's not the speed they wanted in the first place.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

If they didn't do that, the top of the line would be cheaper, so those that go for top of the line are actually hurt.

Re:It's actually a discount

[voidphoenix]

Or maybe there would be no slow and cheap option and everyone would have to buy the top of the line chips...

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

But this isn't the situation here. To offer an upgrade via software all the chips must all be rated at the higher spec. The lower spec coming out of testing which can't make the grade must just be getting binned.

Otherwise I pay for my shiny software upgrade and find it doesn't work or gives me instability. If it detects I can't upgrade somehow then I'm going to be pissed that I bought a CPU expecting to be able to upgrade later and find I can't and have to ditch the thing.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

...for $200 instead of $1000

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

It means they are not being competed with, so it makes sense for them to spend effort on degrading their offering to segment the market. If they were being competed with, then the competitor could sell 2.0 GHz at the lower price and run them out of business - AMD aren't doing that, so they aren't actually competing. Since they have no competitors who are actually competing, apparently, they can set prices only based on what consumers are able to pay and not based on production costs. This happens in a market with a huge barrier to entry such as commodity CPUs. The anger the OP was feeling was because this practice by Intel makes it blatantly obvious that they are not pricing based on production costs, which again makes it blatantly obvious that they are not being properly competed with. Intel is apparently in such a good position that they don't even need to hide the problem from their customers. The OP was angry at paying monopoly prices. Also, people buy chips on a cost/benefit basis, not a "I need a 1.8 GHz CPU whatever the price" basis.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem is perception. Back in the days when (to extend your example) manufacturing mainly produced chips capable of 1.8 GHz, you could still attempt to overclock your chip to 2.0GHz. Most of the time, overclocking produced no ill effect and you got a 2.0 GHz chip for the price of a 1.8 GHz chip. Other times, you let the magic smoke out and lost your investment. Now that manufacturing has gotten better, the chips they label as "1.8 upgradable to 2.0" are not only guaranteed to overclock properly, but that's what Intel wants to sell you.

The bone of contention is that, at the cost of making software-triggered overclocking more available, they've starting locking down the free overclocking avenues. Plus, there's that notion that companies can dictate what you can and can't do with hardware they've sold and use the threat of federal law to stop you. I think that a decent compromise can be struck, though I doubt anyone that matters would agree to it or even hear it. The idea is this: they continue with their software-triggered CPU upgrades, and you have the ability to attempt to overclock it on your own, and at your own risk. If it works (and it should if you know what you're doing) then good for you. However, if you manage to fry your CPU then your warranty is void. Oh, and before they get any funny ideas, make it abundantly clear that intentionally building in "safeguards" against "unauthorized" upgrades will not be tolerated. If they include a feature that fries a perfectly good CPU just to protect their latest revenue stream, then they can refund the user for selling a defective product.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

You just described the business model AMD and Intel have been using for years. The difference is that they're now going to have an official method to overclock the processor for a fee.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

What your describing is a CPU that failed to perform as designed and is being sold cheaper. There is nothing wrong with that. What your leaving out is the part where the user can pay a fee to go faster. You do realize, that in your example, the CPU can not be made to go faster for a fee without failure. People are upset that they are purchasing a perfectly healthy CPU that has been gimped, but can be "fixed" for an additional fee. This is like a tax, or the creation of additional profit margin. Why all the game playing?

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the worth of what they are producing has come down, yet they want to continue selling them at a premium. In essence it's selling glass pearls. Nearly worthless stuff for the price of something valuable. Which is extortion / daylight robbery... which one is the right term? Which is illegal. That's fuckin' why!

And what planet do you live on, where people who can get more power for the same price, would not want it??

They are nothing but greedy bastards. That's all I have to say.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes people here are named "Apple apologists". I've seen similar arguments many enough times that I think we need a separate Intel department.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should the people who wanted 1.8GHz speed care that the part they got could in theory run at 2.0GHz? that's not the speed they wanted in the first place.

It is the speed the customer wanted, they just couldn't afford it. The point is that Intel could make a profit selling the 2.0GHz chips at the 1.8GHz price (if it wasn't profitable they wouldn't do it.) This is a sign of inadequate competition. People are mad because it makes it blatantly obvious instead of somewhat obvious that they are paying a price that is substantially more than the production cost requires.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, your logic for option #1 vs. #2 is brain dead. What you are describing is that it is perfectly acceptable for Intel to collect monopoly rents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

If there is a significant marketplace for 1.8Ghz chips, they'll get made, and a price will get set. Very few chips can't be under clocked, so for people who really want 1.8GHz chips vs. 2.0 GHz chips can likely just under clock them. Intel is taking advantage of their effective cartel position (if you want an x86 part, you can buy it from AMD or Intel, as far as I know, nobody else has a license to build the part, see the big dust up when NVidia, but there aren't really any other serious players in the marketplace). If I can take any old 2.0Ghz chip and turn it into a 1.8Ghz chip. Just sell them all as 2.0Ghz chips, and create a non-segmented market place. The segmentation is artificial, and a form of price controls (it might not be all bad for consumers, but generally speaking artificial price controls in a commodity market are bad).

Re:It's actually a discount

[grizzifus]

I'd say consumers would actually be happier with the 2nd option, where they get the highest clock per quality chip that intel can produce at the best price.
If the processor market were more competitive this would be intel's only option, but it's not, so intel is going with option 3 instead...

Re:It's actually a discount

[Khyber]

"I think you don't understand what's going on. Intel is giving everyone more options"

You don't understand what's going on, so let someone actually involved in the semiconductor industry lay it down for you.

The only extra choices you're being given are "You are no longer doing this yourself and you must pay us for the privilege of tinkering with your hardware" and "If you don't like it, walk away."

It's artificial market segmentation. It is dishonest, it is unethical, and the fact that you support it means you're either just as corrupt, or just as stupid.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Zixia]

Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.

Oh, boo-fucking-hoo. They have advanced their manufacturing process to give superior yields, and rather than offer these yields to more people they want to suck the market for as much money as possible by artificially restricting demand. Yes, they're a business and that's their job, but those are still weasel words apologising for a corporation who are stitching up the public.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.

I think you don't understand what's going on. Intel is giving everyone more options. There's no way this can make you worse off.

You probably don't realize that Intel doesn't make separate "1.8 GHz" and "2.0 GHz" chips. What they do is make many of the same chip, test each chip, and then set the clock frequency depending on how well each chip handles things.

Now imagine many people would rather buy a 1.8GHz chip (it's cheaper and they don't need the extra speed), but the manufacturing process is good and makes mostly 2.0Ghz chips. Intel now has three choices:

1. Keep things as they are. This makes 1.8GHz chips more expensive (supply is less than demand at the current price), and forces people to buy 2.0GHz chips they don't want.
2. Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.
3. Take some chips that could run at 2.0GHz, mark them "1.8GHz" and sell them for a lower price.

Under the last scenario Intel is happier (they got the money of the people who want cheaper parts and got to charge a premium from the people who want faster parts). The consumers are also happier (they got the processor speed they want at the price they want). Why should the people who wanted 1.8GHz speed care that the part they got could in theory run at 2.0GHz? that's not the speed they wanted in the first place.

They weren't looking for 1,8GHz *or* 2.0GHz, they just wanted something that will work and did not cost too much. The crux of your argument centers on Intel maximizing their corporate profit, and once we accept that is a good thing the overall benefit of this crippling scheme becomes readily apparent. You say consumers are getting what they want at a price they want, and I say that is completely wrong.

Obviously consumers would prefer to get the best product for the lowest price, so consumers are not getting the price they want, they are getting they price they are willing to bear, that is all.

I think the proof that you're wrong lies right on the face of things. Most consumers *don't* know their 1.8GHz chips may also run at 2.0GHz just fine. This isn't a fact Intel advertises. This is something they obfuscate because it is quite obvious their consumers are being ripped off.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Artificial scarcity is wealth destruction. Wealth destruction is immoral and causes harm to all of society. What Intel are doing is extortion on a grand scale. Everyone understands this. Weasel words don't change the reality.

Re:It's actually a discount

[Antisyzygy]

Uhh, no. Its a way of squeezing more money out of consumers. If yields of superior quality products increase it should bring the price down. That is how Free Market Capitalism is supposed to work. Increased supply, similar demand, price goes down. What Intel is doing is a greedy maneuver to artificially increase prices and I hope to god it will hurt them in the end. Its this sort of uncompetitive monopolistic greedy bullshit that is ruining the US economy. I haven't bought Intel for the last decade or so, and I certainly am not going to now.

Re:It's actually a discount

[doccus]

If they *didn't* do that, the shareholders would certainly make sure that that was the last move that the current C.E.O. made.. Sure, it's artificial market segmentation.. and it just *feels* wrong to the majority of folks. but most modern business practiced *feel* wrong anyways these days.. You have to remember, who is the most important demographic to any public corporation? The shareholders, naturally... The *public*...well...hmmm....

Re:It's actually a discount

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.

I think you don't understand what's going on. Intel is giving everyone more options. There's no way this can make you worse off.

You probably don't realize that Intel doesn't make separate "1.8 GHz" and "2.0 GHz" chips. What they do is make many of the same chip, test each chip, and then set the clock frequency depending on how well each chip handles things.

Now imagine many people would rather buy a 1.8GHz chip (it's cheaper and they don't need the extra speed), but the manufacturing process is good and makes mostly 2.0Ghz chips. Intel now has three choices:

1. Keep things as they are. This makes 1.8GHz chips more expensive (supply is less than demand at the current price), and forces people to buy 2.0GHz chips they don't want.
2. Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.
3. Take some chips that could run at 2.0GHz, mark them "1.8GHz" and sell them for a lower price.

Under the last scenario Intel is happier (they got the money of the people who want cheaper parts and got to charge a premium from the people who want faster parts). The consumers are also happier (they got the processor speed they want at the price they want). Why should the people who wanted 1.8GHz speed care that the part they got could in theory run at 2.0GHz? that's not the speed they wanted in the first place.

probably no one want 1.8GHz chip if he can to obtain 2.0GHz chip. I prefer 1THz chip

IBM's Been Doing This For Years

[Greyfox]

IBM's been doing this sort of thing with their mainframes, probably at least 20 years. You order a specified amount of hardware and they ship you more with most of it disabled. If you decide you want more, you give them a large briefcase full of cash and they turn some more on for you. It's actually cheaper than sending techs out, and easier than replacing your mainframe or disk array every few years. They can also do you temporary extra processing power in the lead-up to tax day or for year-end financial processing.

I'm sure Intel (Or IBM for that matter) would be able to sell you the fully enabled kit up front for a suitably large briefcase of cash. But maybe you don't need all that processing power right now. I don't see any problem with getting what you pay for.

Re:IBM's Been Doing This For Years

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember even some personal computer manufacturers doing similar things - though largely due to selling set-ups for which they could no longer source parts.

As an example, a computer with 320kB (single-side) floppy drives, where the actual hardware was dual-side (640kB) drives, but the OS limited the floppy use to SS. Later, when hard disks became more common in the market, the same company sold machines with 10MB and 20MB HD capacities. Later on, the 10MB HD models disappeared from the market, so from this on the computers sold "with 10 MB HD" actually had the 20MB drive installed, but just partitioned to only provide 10MB capacity to the user -- and FDISK excluded from the OS delivery.

Customer could, of course, later choose to upgrade these things to the more capable models - and paying full prices perhaps for just repartitioning or new set of OS disks. And at that time, most of the customers didn't even know they'd owned the more capable (but just software-crippled) machine from the start.

IBM mainframe

[tepples]

I'm really quite surprised that by now we're not seeing manufacturers trying to license physical goods.

I read about the same thing happening a long time ago with IBM's mainframes.

$50 upgrade

[jklovanc]

According to this article the upgrade costs $50.

Can an FPGA multitask?

[tepples]

Load/unload them as circuits on demand rather than as instruction codes in banks of RAM.

But how long would it take to load and unload them if you're running two applications, each of which has a component that runs on the FPGA? Or would we end up with thrashing worse than the swapping to disk seen on a RAM-starved PC?

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[Doc Ruby]

Multitasking is a simulation sequential CPUs do of parallel computing FPGAs actually do. FPGA is inherently parallel. Instructions aren't un/loaded; data is routed to different instructions that exist simultaneously on the chip.

Of course FPGA has limited (even when large) capacity for simultaneous instructions, whether single or multiple instances of a given instruction needed to process different data at a single time. But there techniques from sequential computing are useful. Most programs are not fully parallelizable even with infinite computing resources (sequential dependencies of results). So the CPU can rotate circuits between instantiation and storage depending on logic of what's actually needed. It might be a long time before FPGA capacity and predictive logic keeps data fully serviced in the maximum possible parallelization, but it's taken a long time for sequential computing to evolve such strategies that we start with for reference. And along the way we've got lots more computing power to use more efficiently, so no computing resources ever sit idle.

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[dtdmrr]

Reconfigurable logic can be virtualized to get around the area limitations. Have a look at the SCORE publications for research on that topic: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~andre/compute_models.html

Tabula is a new FPGA company that implements time multiplexed logic to extend the effective size of a computation you can put in a given size chunk of silicon: http://www.tabula.com/ Their products are still statically scheduled and not really amenable to the full virtualization of the SCORE model, but its a real product and you can buy one today.

There's a big space between the fully spatial FPGA and the fully temporal CPU, and we've been seeing that space fill slowly over time. From the CPU side, we've seen cores handle more operations per cycle, hyperthreading, and no multi-core is the default configuration. GPUs are now composed of hundreds or thousands of execution units that are simpler than CPU cores, but more complex than the logic blocks in FPGAs.

There are problems that are best suited for each of these architectures. When you play a graphics intensive game, you expect the GPU to handle stuff its good at and the CPU to handle the bits its good at. FPGAs are just a little bit more obscure. But hybridization does make sense. That's why we've seen PowerPC and Arm cores embedded in reconfigurable fabrics, and now Intel putting FPGA cores in the same package as their dies. We're long past the point of saying that any of these are irrelevant because they are not the optimal solution for all problems.

To add to that, your comment on idle resources. We're also hitting thermal limits. Yes we can still put more and more transistors in a chip, but we can't switch them all simultaneously at full speed without frying the chip. Increasing cache size and core count helps. But if you're going to have more area than can be used simultaneously it makes sense to add different resources that handle different tasks more efficiently (energy and latency). That's part of why intel, amd and nvidia are all mixing GPU and CPU cores on die. If the atom+fpga combo works out well, I would expect to see regions on reconfigurable fabric directly on die in the not to distant future.

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[tepples]

So the CPU can rotate circuits between instantiation and storage

Then please allow me to rephrase my question: Is this rotation fast enough that the illusion of multitasking can be maintained? For example, a video game might need physics, vertex shading, geometry shading, pixel shading, audio decompression, audio mixing, and the like all executed 30 times a second.

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[Doc Ruby]

I'll repeat my answer: multitasking is a sequential CPU simulation of the parallel processing that is actual on FPGA. Typically such rotation is not practiced on FPGA, since the actual parallelism is sufficient without simulating it.

The reconfig time depends on which reconfig technique is used. In a typical FPGA (different makes/models differ in their behavior), each gate can reconfig in one clock cycle (up to 0.5-1GHz); like everything else in FPGA, all gates can change all at once, in parallel. The existing config can modify itself in microseconds. If loading an entire new config netlist, that's limited by the IO bandwidth, which is bottlenecked by the bus to the gates and the IO port. Bus speed is often Tbps on chips like the Intel Atom and Xilinx Zynq I mentioned, which is therefore not usually the bottleneck. The IO port is part of the reconfigurable HW on the chip; it's physically limited in width by the number of assignable chip pins connected to memory in which config "netlists" are stored. A chip that relies on such reconfig speed could have dozens of pins dedicated to such reconfig. So a 512KB gates netlist delivered across say 64 pins at 500MHz could take about 131us, or about 7630 times a second.

But again, that game's various custom instructions would probably all fit within a single large FPGA without reconfiguration. Even several concurrent processes' set of custom instructions (even without considering overlap with other processes') could fit on a single large FPGA. And FPGA is largely scalable; add more FPGA chips glued to each other by their pins. Then one FPGA routes data to the right FPGA which has the appropriate circuits on it for the data at that time. As FPGA becomes ever cheaper and more dense, the need for reconfig to "task switch" becomes even less.

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[Doc Ruby]

Do you think the Xilinx Zynq will be (relatively) easily scalable by adding more FPGA chips across an extended AMBA bus? That architecture has FPGA highly integrated on the CPU die by high bandwidth of that highly flexible bus; the Atom is linked to its onchip FPGA by only a couple of serial lines. AMBA is really the disruptive tech at work in this space.

Maybe the multicore ARMs are able to scale distributing processing across offchip cores, with a lot of FPGA fabric and an excellent bus supporting the glue. More gates executing against more data in parallel rather than faster clocks has kept Moore's law predicting "sequential" CPU performance. It should do the same for FPGA.

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[dtdmrr]

I'm not really familiar with AMBA. However, if for whatever reason AMBA does not scale, one could simply architect a system where the reconfigurable fabric interfaces with multiple AMBA islands :) I hope that scalability is being carefully considered and it does not come to that.

It wouldn't be the first architecture to use FPGAs to support cooperation of processors. The Cray XD1 is one example, it had a mix of opterons and virtex fpgas, some of which were available for compute others solely for interconnect. On a side note the intel paragon used xilinx fpgas to control the leds on the doors, back when super computers where more fun to watch.

I agree I don't think Moore's law has been focused on sequential or even single threaded performance for quite a while. I do think things are getting more interesting. Clock and voltage scaling seem to be very slow if not entirely stalled. Density and die size still seem to be scaling nicely.

I'd also like to point out the trend for lower power devices. I wonder what the trend is for balance of compute and energy is for things like laptops and cell phones. The laptop trend seems to be slow decrease in power consumption with whatever compute fits in that power budget. Cell phones seem a bit more confusing. I would expect to see battery life of smart phones increase with each new generation, but there seems to be an obsession with computational power. On the upshot, at least cell battery life doesn't seem to be getting much worse. I suppose people might actually reject a phone that fails to survive a normal day of use.

Re:Can an FPGA multitask?

[Doc Ruby]

I worked in the early 1990s at a startup that interconnected multiple parallel DSPs (AT&T DSP32C) by (Plessey, then Xilinx) FPGA. A lead DSP preprocessed the stream to dice it into parallel tasks, which it distributed through the FPGA to the parallel DSPs. Mainly it decomposed a single color image into independent color channels, transforming color spaces in the master thread for faster processing in the slave threads. The FPGA gradually absorbed more CLU logic from the original app that was prototyped on a 386 and ported to a single DSP, reducing the DSPs to more totally ALU logic. If the company had survived Bush Sr's 1991 recession, we probably would have had a multichip module by 1994 that worked essentially the way the Zynq does now in 2011.

I'm not sure how the AMBA bus scales across chips. But since one of the geniuses at my old company is one of the geniuses at Xilinx now, I expect that one way or another their Zynqs will scale using the onchip tech.

As for power efficiency, the Atom design targets mobile, while Zynq is reported to dissipate under 2W ("typical", maybe not with full FPGA execution), at under $15 a chip in quantity. If Zynq's FPGA executes logic more efficiently (BitsOutput:WattConsumed) than general purpose ARMs over the course of a whole day of diverse smartphone use, then mobile devices might swing over to them in a rush. Indeed Google's Dalvik JVM differs from Sun's JVM in being register oriented rather than stack oriented. If so, then FPGA matches Dalvik more closely than even ARM, and the performance:power ratio could be the best of any Android device.

ask what they can switch on that they don't tell!

[kubitus]

and CPU identification is the least of what I think.

to put among several million transistors some functionality ( speak program ) you don't know about should be trivial!.

Brace for impact...

[Announcer]

I have to quote Scotty, here: "The more they soup up the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Imagine the havoc virus writers will be able to have, once they figure out how to hack the physical hardware?! No thank you! I would rather replace the chip, or put it into a dedicated hardware programmer, than to have it changeable by software! This is a security nightmare in the making... and it ONLY works under Windows! I shudder at the thought!

Scam

[JustNiz]

Hey if I bought a CPU that has the hardware to do some level of performance, I expect it to do it out of the box.

Re:Scam

[Arlet]

You can get the top level performance for the hardware. You just need to pay a bit more.

Or, look at it from the other way. If you don't need top performance, they'll give you a discount.

Re:Scam

[taxman_10m]

We are doing you a favor by punching you in the nose. We could have punched you in the balls instead!

Re:Scam

[lgarner]

If it does exactly what it says, then their obligation has been fulfilled.

nothing new

[mostlyDigital]

One advantage of advanced age is that I remember when they used to do stuff like this. I remember disk drives the size of a dish washer that were 80MB (!) or 160 MB selectable by jumper. Imagine the hardware tech trying to talk his way out of that. I remember a line of minicomputers where lower end boxes were lower end because a no-op was inserted into the code in the firmware. Sure you're pissed off because you're having your nose rubbed in their obviously high profit margins. But it's nothing new. Next time you look at any piece of electronics think about the the fact that it's probably being sold as any number of different priced models with some features turned on or off. Intel just isn't playing the game of pretending to swap out a device when they're just switching a jumper.

Re:nothing new

[maxwells_deamon]

I remember a Popular Electronics magazine article on how to modify one model of four function calculator to enable it to have the memory function. The internals were basically the same. The cost difference at the time was such that you could take the calculator apart, buy the switches, do a little grinding, drilling, and soldering. And save some money,

If you are too young to understand the above, let me know and I will go off topic to explain. I know mostlydigital will understand.

you mean

[fireylord]

P.E.N.T.I.U.M.
(Produces Erronious Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Math(s)?

Obligatory..

[SuperCharlie]

Well.. I bought this 4-door car (its all they sell) but only the front 2 doors open. I can buy the upgrade package which they will send via OnStar which will unlock the back two doors, but its another $5k. If I change/modify the motor the back doors wont work any more.

Re:Obligatory..

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Well.. I bought this 4-door car (its all they sell) but only the front 2 doors open. I can buy the upgrade package which they will send via OnStar which will unlock the back two doors, but its another $5k. If I change/modify the motor the back doors wont work any more.

Close, but it's more like you bought a two-door car that also had two unusable doors, then paid more to get all four working. You could have paid for the four-door version from the get-go but only needed two at the time and wanted to save some money. There's a subtle difference.

Some, including me, would argue there is value in increasing the longevity of a hardware platform by offering later upgrades. If you needed a 3GHz CPU why did you only buy a 2GHz CPU? I think what really pisses people off is that they value the increased performance but think they should get it for no cost. It's the same argument as mobile tethering. If it had no value, no one would give a shit. And because people do value it, only an idiot would provide it for no cost.

Re:ask what they can switch on that they don't tel

[Arlet]

Why would you care if there was a serial number in the CPU ? First of all, it would only matter if there was a software driver for it that would read out the serial number and do something with it. Secondly, even if that happened, the number isn't tied to any of your personal data, so it still wouldn't matter.

Every NIC already has a unique MAC address, and nobody cares about that.

no, things aren't

[YesIAmAScript]

FPGAs are too expensive and take too much power.

FPGAs are very transistor-inefficient and thus are very expensive and power hungry. To give you an example, programming an ARM Cortex A8 into an FPGA requires a multi-thousand dollar FPGA and takes double or triple digits of Watts of power. While a regular ASIC one costs less than $20 and takes a Watt or so. Also the FPGA one runs at perhaps 50MHz and the ASIC one runs at 1GHz.

Intel's reason for the FPGA is because they don't license their IP, the only way to integrate your logic with theirs without multiple chips is to use this. But that's a weak solution. With ARM you can license their IP and integrate it yourself in an ASIC, you'd be a fool to use an FPGA in a large-scale deployment, you're just throwing money away. In short-run deployments FPGAs make a ton of sense.

Use of FPGAs with DSPs is more common, programmable analog/digital logic can be very useful, like Cypress' PSOC (8051 based though, not ARM). I believe most cable/DSL modems use DSPs.

Re:no, things aren't

[Doc Ruby]

That's why Xilinx added a 500MHz FPGA tightly integrated as a bus peripheral of a multicore ARM-C9. The Zynq-7000 will cost somewhere between $20 and $50, depending on the model (and amount of FPGA).

Both the Atom and Zynq FPGA versions are about to make FPGA as mass market (embedded, in cars and industrial control, then in multimedia workstations) as DSPs have become. Every PC has multiple DSPs, at least in soundcards and often in video systems and sometimes in network interfaces; hard drives often have them, too.

I described how FPGA will evolve. I believe the Atom and Zynq chips are the first flow across the watershed. Within a matter of years FPGA will be far cheaper and more powerful than purely sequential CPUs, though as available to mainstream developers.

Re:no, things aren't

[PixelJaded]

The problem is that no matter how much technology evolves, the relative performance / efficiency of the FPGA will always be inferior to hard-wired logic by a similar performance ratio.

ARM chips with FPGAs are not, and will never, be competing against fully integrated SoCs like you find on a modern mobile phone with hardware video encode / decode functionality and other special circuitry. That's because implementing these functions in the FPGA is orders of magnitude worse (not just cost but power consumption and performance) than hard wired logic, at best usually as good as implementing on a GPU, and for a large set of problems worse even than a general purpose CPU.

The main reason Intel is providing the FPGA is for I/O connectivity. An FPGA can have a small amount of seperate, dedicated logic for multiple tasks, allowing it to elegantly handle difficult timing requirements. Its allows you e.g. to connect an ISA device to your modern CPU without having to buy a customised CPU with an ISA bus, or a seperate ISA - PCIe bridge. I wouldn't call myself an expert but I have succesfully programmed FPGAs to do things more efficiently than the equivalent price / power Intel CPUs. Its certainly not a good general purpose solution to most problems though. You tend to select an algorithm more amenable to FPGA implementation, rather than simply implement the best algorithm (the one that gives you the best result) more efficiently. I've seen people who didn't understand how FPGAs work try to implement inappropriate algorithms and end up needing a $2,000 FPGA chewing 100W to do a task slower than a $200 30W Intel mobile CPU.

In some ways, FPGAs are less exciting for computing tasks than they were historically, because nowadays we can buy chips with hundreds of simple, low performance CPUs (ie. a GPU) that are as good or better than FPGAs for many simple, repetitive calculations.

By contrast, for I/O, FPGAs are more interesting than ever, because you can implement a lot of low-moderate performance I/O on a small FPGA, rather than having to build specific SoCs for specific devices, or connect external I/O chips. The cost of building this FPGA into the CPU has decreased much more than the cost of designing / packaging two chips, or manufacturing a custom chip in small quantities.

Crippled parts suggests a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

Under effective competition making and selling a good product would earn just enough to keep the business worthwhile, and putting more effort into making a less-good product would not.

So long intel.

[pjr.cc]

As an example, What does shit me is that intel are making a cpu for whatever it costs, they can afford to sell it for $150 and be turning a profit. But why do that, lets gimp it sell it for $150 then sell them the 50$ upgrade later on. Now if it were a case that they made only 3ghz cpu's and those that couldnt meet 3ghz specs were sold as 2.8ghz for a cheaper price (or whatever specs they end up meeting), then that makes sense, after all the number of 3ghz cpu's rolling out the factor is limited by the number that actually meet the specs, so fair is fair. But this is garbage, all the cpu's meet the specs they need and they can afford to sell them at the gimped price. Personally, its probably the last straw for me when it comes to intel equipment, i've had enough of their garbage.

Like it or not, to me its another reason to stay from intel and move to amd. Its also a good reason why (if it is giong to happen) the pc market will die off and arm will grow stronger and stronger. People can argue in favour of this all they want, but the reality is, they can sell a really heavily performing cpu for a really cheap cost cause they can afford to, but instead they go for a golden screwdriver approach.

That really is pathetic. It happens in enterprise all the time with enterprise grade equipment. Also happens alot in software, but in both cases there can be other justifications. The truth is they could just sell the cpus for the "cheap" cost of the gimped cpu (WITHOUT GIMPING IT) and still be happily in profits without having to resort to this rubbish, theres just not justification for this kind of crap behavior.

Re:So long intel.

[lgarner]

...they can afford to sell it for $150 and be turning a profit...

So, you're the Profit Police and will have the authority to determine profit for others. No, thanks.

...another reason to stay from intel and move to amd.

If, and only if, AMD's products offer better value. That tends to vary. My current PC is AMD, my next one very well might not be. I'll buy Intel if they have a better value proposition.

... they can sell a really heavily performing cpu for a really cheap cost cause they can afford to...

But, they don't have to. That's one of the two edges of having a (somewhat) free economy. You can buy products based on the value that you place on the, and others can price products to meet that demans. Thankfully, the government hasn't started enforcing prices or profit margins on chips, cars, dry cleaning, etc.

Actually, no

[Anonymous Coward]

Changing the frequency has nothing to do with FPGAs or microcode; it just changes the multiplier and a few other registers.

why only frequency ?

[wood_dude]

Why don't they allow reconfigurtion of the whole gate array ? Just like on FPGAS ? Chris

you don't own your hardware anymore

[pthreadunixman]

Hurray. Now you don't own your hardware anymore; you just license a right to use it at a certain specification.

The Cisco business model

[symbolset]

This feature is enabled with the purchase of an optional license.

Why is this so difficult to understand?

[linuxguy]

Microsoft (and countless other companies) sell you their software in the same way. You get the top of the line product for more money. The ones with less features (you call them crippled) go for less.

Some of these companies allow you to upgrade these products later for a fee.

How the hell is this different? When you make your CPU purchase, you know exactly what you are getting. You have an option to upgrade later if you would like. Can someone point out exactly where the scam is, while not just pretending to be utterly dumb?

Intel needs a strong competitor to keep moving

[symbolset]

Otherwise, like this, they get distracted by their PHBs into avenues that generate revenue or consolidate market position, but do nothing to drive progress.

Actually, So What

[Doc Ruby]

I didn't say it did. I just pointed out that new FPGA hybrid CPUs will see much more downloadable upgrades to CPUs than this pioneering act that is the subject of the story.

Re:ask what they can switch on that they don't tel

[kubitus]

consider a trojan boot loader in a router.

if such a small piece of software sits in a router, camouflaged by dirty programming, it could be activated by a key riding on a search engine answer, addressable by the device or CPU serial number.

then it learns what it's orders from instructions which ride piggyback on search engine answers

your router or PC ( and CPU ) is of no interest as long as you have nothing special. The very moment you have you become a sought after target.

Now if the fifth column is already in your router ( or PC ) it is far more efficient than Echelon.

Last Thing I need

[Chuby007]

ok the last thing I need is someone making virii for my processor :S damn it !

AMD gives it away for free.

[unity100]

Even, its a feature. look what people did with phenom ii 955 black edition :

http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&hs=4qi&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=phenom+955+overclocked+to+7.1+ghz&oq=phenom+955+overclocked+to+7.1+ghz&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=3190l6170l0l6316l15l15l0l10l0l1l406l1003l1.2.1.0.1l5l0

some psychos overclocked the chip to 7.1 ghz as opposed to its core clock of 3.4 ghz.

intel shows its intelness. they knew people were overclocking left and right, and in the spirit of a corporation which has paid pc makers not to use their competitor, they are trying to siphon off money from customers.

so, they will soft-lock a cpu, while selling me HARDWARE, then sell me SOFTWARE to unlock their HARDWARE.

whores.

At least its software now

[nten]

Meaning we can all chuckle at the impotence of the DMCA whilst we snag a copy of the i3_2_i7.tgz file that will exist in 3.. 2.. 1..

Used to be you had to do hardware mods to unlock the extra multipliers, if it was even possible at all without decasing the thing. This is a good thing for geeks in that prices for good hardware will be artificially lowered for those willing to do a bit of torrenting and twiddling. From a big picture though, Intel is destroying value it already created by limiting chips below their potential. The reason it works is that people who want the best are willing to pay a lot more, but there aren't that many of them. Its a way to get people to pay what they are willing to pay. Amazon talked about using past purchases to gauge how much a buyer would be willing to spend and then charge that price, so that different people payed different amounts for the same items. This is essentially the same thing, as the unlock software does not actually represent value added in the sense it took negligible effort to create.

Analogy

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you like video games with DLC that is on the DVD/Bluray?!? This is the feeling many people have with this magic bit that is limiting things.

I wonder if this goes on in the drive market?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone find it odd that drive makers steadily increase the size of hard disk drives on an almost mechanical timeline? It's like they've got 100 terrabyte drives already and they are just milking it with each incremental increment in drive size.

Scam

[nurb432]

Building in limitations is just wrong.

Now if down the road they learn new ways of doing things, and offer new firmware, cool. But intentionally selling you a crippled device is just wrong in my book.

Re:Overclocking is bad, unless you pay us more fir

[Lennie]

Probably, but maybe they also have set the microcode up in such a way to prevent such things from working ?

and AMD has black cpus with multiplier unlocked

[Joe_Dragon]

and AMD has black cpus with multiplier unlocked and there is no windows only software that is needed to change the speed.

under the DMCA runing a non windows os may brake

[Joe_Dragon]

under the DMCA running a non windows os may break the law. If you take the law to extreme. Let's say the Linux kernel auto unlocks the CPU or maybe the MB does the auto unlocking If Intel wanted to be a big butt hole all they need to do is add some fine print saying for windows use only or only for a short list of MB's then they can take you to court.

fine sent it back COD and stuff as much junk as yo

[Joe_Dragon]

fine sent it back COD and stuff as much junk as you can fit in the box.

In IBM language

[cvtan]

This is what used to be called the "magic screwdriver". You sell the customer something with features disabled and when they complain, you appear, make a big show of technical force and flip a software switch which enables something that was there all along. You're a hero! No wait; it's really: profit.

question

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU M 370 @ 2.40GHz

can i use one of these software upgrades?

thanks!

This greatly improve the learning the language of

[Anonymous Coward]

This greatly improve the learning the language of the interest
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R&D

[Anonymous Coward]

When you buy a cpu, a large chunk of the money, especially for high end CPUs goes to R&D. It has always been the case that bleeding edge CPUs pay for most of the R&D so that next year they can sell the budget model for little above the manufacturing cost. What intel is doing is allowing you to retroactively throw more money into the R&D pie and get a better product. Its more like upgrading to windows 7 premium from home edition than a honda to an acura.

This greatly improve the learning the language of

[Anonymous Coward]

This greatly improve the learning the language of the interest
Downloaded fromnorth face sale the Internet foreign films and television shows are another effective aid in language learningThrough the visit the site specializes in the interests of the people, such as computer science, sports or music, may find the language learning is easier, because interest is the best teacher service. This greatly improve the learning the language of the interest
Downloaded fromnorth face sale the Internet foreign films and television shows are another effective aid in language learningThrough the visit the site specializes in the interests of the people, such as computer science, sports or music, may find the language learning is easier, because interest is the best teacher service. This greatly improve the learning the language of the interest
Downloaded fromnorth face sale the Internet foreign films and television shows are another effective aid in language learningThrough the visit the site specializes in the interests of the people, such as computer science, sports or music, may find the language learning is easier, because interest is the best teacher service. This greatly improve the learning the language of the interest
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Sorry, it's genius

[mrshermanoaks]

What average consumer wouldn't throw another $49.95 as a first step in troubleshooting a slow computer? And I imagine they sell direct, so they don't have to split the money with the original retailer. Genius.

Good Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a great idea on Intel's part. They are already binning chips to see how fast they can perform. Why not let someone be able to buy a lower end chip, then upgrade if if they so choose. I would imagine this is preferable to buying a completely new chip. If they didn't want to do this, they would put a hardware lock on the other cores and then you would have no option other than a completely new chip.

Same old trick, different supplier

[Anonymous Coward]

ICL (UK) Ltd and IBM used to play the same trick in their mainframes. They would sell the lowest spec m/f, containing the most performant CPUs but with hardwire loops installed on the motherboard (these were literally loops of wire). For a substantial upgrade price, an engineer would visit, snip one of the cables (while you weren't looking) and voila! - an upgraded processor! One ICL Lineprinter could be upgraded by merely flicking a switch internally, which is exactly what an engineer would do when he was waiting for a large system dump to print out, otherwise he'd be there all day.

Closer and closer to downloading that car.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how much time will it take for legitimate cracks to appear? Will probably require flashing your BIOS, but many people would be okay with the risks if it meant unlocking i7 for the price of i3.

Manufacturing is cheap, R&D is expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

Manufacturing is cheap, but R&D is expensive. If you want the extra hardware, you pay your share of the R&D costs. But for manufacturing purposes, it's cheaper to print the same circuits into the same silicon for both options. Reconfiguring the manufacturing plant for two different types of hardware would result in both the low and high grade processors being more expensive. Enterprise computing (where manufacturing runs are smaller) has done this for years - Intel's simply catching up. It's like having your own little mainframe...

Most/all of you are forgetting something...

[RichiH]

...all of you are more or less pretending that this is a blatant rip-off from day one or Intel giving the consumer more options.

What no one seems to anticipate is how this will change the market.

Is this a move that will give the customer more options at the same initial price? Yes.

But history has shown time and time again that once a company has the ability to press more money out of a customer, they will.
Be it the scumbag OEM who can now claim speeds of "up to* 3 GHz" or similar, be it Intel who may very well run scary-ish ads and campaigns that urge you upgrade or simply "options" which are really mandatory but the average Joe does not find out until way too late.

This is not about replacing the artificial crippling of CPUs with upgrade options. This is about creating an infrastructure to get more money out of the end customer.

And yes, if you are reading this, chances are you will not fall for it even though it annoy you. Consider yourself lucky. Your parents, friends, etc? Not so much.

Oh wow.

[bmecoli]

After many years of waiting, it looks like I can finally download Megahertz.

CPU upgrades - software / hardware

[Brassrat70s]

Nothing new and nothing to be upset about. E.g., Years ago Prime Computer had multiple models with different processing performance ... the difference between the machines was the number of wait states in the micro-code. If you want to go further back, the IBM 1130 came with at least 2 memory options - the difference was whether a wire disabling half of the memory was cut or not - it was just more cost effective to manufacture a single memory board (yes whole boards with little magnetic cores) and enable the memory in the field. You get what you pay for ... if you want more power you pay more, if it's more cost effective to manufacture a singe part with modifiable software or field modifiable hardware then that is good for everyone.

Piracy

[hsa]

I've stopped downloading illegal software after finding a decent place to work years ago (so I can afford the things I need now!).

This is a total exception. I would definately use some illegal "crack" to unleash the full power of the product I bought. It was crippled at the time of purchase and I am just "fixing it".

I don't see any moral problems with this. That is why I am not posting as AC.

Hardware DLC anybody?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked great for games, why not for hardware?

Heh.

To whoever tagged the story needsahack...

[djdanlib]

Indeed it does need a hack.

This looks like a job for the NEON folks. Anyone remember zPrime?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/ibm_countersues_neon/

I wonder how soon such a utility will arise for the new generation.

Therefore, over a period of time, and to try a few

[Anonymous Coward]

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