Intel Wants to Charge $50 To Enable HyperThreading and To Unlock Your Cache
Intel has been offering an ‘Upgrade Service’ that enables upgrades of your PC platform capabilities after the initial hardware shipment by paying extra and downloading an unlock code from the internet. You basically enter a code into your machine and it unlocks features on the CPU that were blocked before. In 2010 Intel began rolling out a small pilot program offering performance upgrades on Intel Pentium G6951 Processor for starters. The guys over at Engadget found out that Best Buy is part of the program with the Gateway SX2841-09e that happens to be running the Intel Pentium G6951 Processor. For $50 you can unlock or enable HyperThreading support and unlock the full 1MB L3 cache on the processor. It sounds like it the features have always been on the processor, but they were locked out by a software block before. What do you guys think about this business model? You are basically paying extra to unlock features the processor already has. You can check out the process here on Intel’s upgrade site.
Hold onto your hyperthreaded horses, because this is liable to whip up an angry mob — Intel’s asking customers to pay extra if they want the full power of their store-bought silicon. An eagle-eyed Engadget reader was surfing the Best Buy shelves when he noticed this $50 card — and sure enough, Intel websites confirm — that lets you download software to unlock extra threads and cache on the new Pentium G6951 processor. Hardware.info got their hands on an early sample of the chip and discovered it’s actually a full 1MB of L3 cache that’s enabled plus HyperThreading support, which translates to a modest but noticeable upgrade. This isn’t exactly an unprecedented move, as chip companies routinely sell hardware-locked chips all the time in a process known as binning, but there they have a simpler excuse — binned chips are typically sold with cores or cache locked because that part of their silicon turned out defective after printing. This new idea is more akin to video games that let you “download” extra weapons and features, when those features were on the disc all along.
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