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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."
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.
Its more of the original chip is underclocked than the software overclocking it
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.
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.
With them making Sandy Bridge non overclockable unless you pay extra, this was very likely to happen
According to the FAQ, if you replace your motherboard, the upgrade is no longer valid on the chip.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
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.
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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)?
Except that you probably cannot overclock them yourself as it wont be a K series processor
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%.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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make install -not war
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.
Wait till it start corrupting data on "cracked" processors as a form of DRM.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
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...
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.
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.
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?
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
s/by/buy
If their price is good for either the standard, or for the upgraded version, I couldn't care less how it's done.
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.
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.
Just tried it. It was free.
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.
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.
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
No, you need to purchase an upgrade card.
*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.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
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...
This is not a new idea ... Ros Perot got rich by licencing CPUs by the second.
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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?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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...)
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!
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.
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.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
The people buying the crippled versions for less wouldn't buy the uncrippled versions for more anyway, so you gain.
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
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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?
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
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:
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.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
According to this article the upgrade costs $50.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
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.
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
Mod parent up. Intel is just using an already successful business model employed by IBM.
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.
to put among several million transistors some functionality ( speak program ) you don't know about should be trivial!.
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.
... 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.
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!
Willie...
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
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).
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
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.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
P.E.N.T.I.U.M.
(Produces Erronious Numbers Through Incorrect Understanding of Math(s)?
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.
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
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.
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.
It will still require enough effort that most people won't do it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
No sig today...
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
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.
Good-bye
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.
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.
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
Why don't they allow reconfigurtion of the whole gate array ? Just like on FPGAS ? Chris
Hurray. Now you don't own your hardware anymore; you just license a right to use it at a certain specification.
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.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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Help stamp out iliturcy.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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?
Otherwise, like this, they get distracted by their PHBs into avenues that generate revenue or consolidate market position, but do nothing to drive progress.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
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?
i don't know about you, but i would consider maxing out on web pages to be a pretty crappy CPU
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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.
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.
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.
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.
He who has no
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.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
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.
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.
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
ok the last thing I need is someone making virii for my processor :S damn it !
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.
Read radical news here
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?
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Yes, and your point is?
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
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.
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.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
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).
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
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)
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!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
New things are always on the horizon
Probably, but maybe they also have set the microcode up in such a way to prevent such things from working ?
New things are always on the horizon
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 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 you can fit in the box.
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.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
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.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
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...
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)
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
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?
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
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.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
hmm, can you put this into the form of a car analogy?
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.
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.
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"
...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?
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)...
One that hath name thou can not otter
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...
How much comes from overclocking, and how much comes from better microcode?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
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.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
...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.
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.
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.
Thanks for elaborating on that. That's what I was alluding to, but I was posting from mobile.
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.
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.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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.
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?
... 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.