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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."
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.
According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip.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.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Just tried it. It was free.
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...
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...)
... 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.
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.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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.
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.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
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...