Sunday, September 19, 2010

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.
Intel Pentium G6951 Processor

6 comments:

  1. And this is when Intel puts on their trollface

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  2. To me, this is just an advertisement for AMD

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  3. WTF!!! thats BS!!!!

    Why charge for something that should be free

    thats like car company's saying oh we are gunna charge you $100 to activate your AC.

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  4. thats gay ._. I'm sure someone will find a way to hack it.

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