Intel Charging $50 to Unlock CPU's Full Features

[youssef 2010]

clever but that can start a competition between the company's own models

 

[Guest]

This would be like buying a chip that's guaranteed to overclock so far. I think it's great, Intel already build powerful chips and then cripple them or the low end market, but you can never be certain that there isn't a slight flaw in the core that was turned off or whatever. This way we'll get cheap chips that are tested to run faster or with extra features. And yeah, they'll be hacked in no time, but even if not, at least it would provide an easy upgrade route in years to come, after a new socket becomes the norm, and the fastest chips made for you socket type, are now fetching a tidy sum on ebay because they're in such short supply.

 

[Guest]

WHAT??? Even if was disposed to pay the extra money for unlocking the full capabilities of the cpu, do you really think that intel wasn't already made you pay the hardware that you have? You pay the full cpu when you buy it and then pay again, this is golden chicken for intel. I think I'll start to buy AMD so Intel understand that they can't do whatever they want to.

 

[Guest]

I just remembered one thing...maybe Intel is trying to go bankrupt, why? Everybody buys the cpu for the minimum price and then it unlocks it's all features. Intel doesn't receive the receipts that intended and then we all buy AMD...ah ah

 

[Guest]

Your comments are very disappointing, showing that you are sheeples acting as if you find this to be something new. Hardware vendors have been castrating their products since years now BECAUSE there is no real competition out there.

It s mostly resellers and a few main companies producing real hardware components, all in the hand of a few greedy money grabbers which are out to destroy our environment in the name of profit and power.

I have to admit that i am surprised intel did it so openly this time, what has been going on forever. Maybe now, even the last idiot will understand what has been going on forever.

Motherboards you can unlock full raid0 capabilities via firmware(software), nvidia cards you could unlock to full professional quattro cards via firmware (back then till they physically castrated them).
GTX 465 you can unlock to a full gtx 470 via firmware. (the GTX 470 has been physically castrated and cannot be unlocked to a gtx 480)
Wireless routers which with some simple firmware(software) can do way more than what they deliver them with. See openWRT.
Creative Soundblaster cards which are deliberately reducing sound quality via drivers. See kxproject.

You think all this would be possible with real competition? No it would not, because the competitor would release his hardware un- castrated and could sell a better product at the same price, because the manufacturing cost would be the same.

Switching from intel to AMD or any other brand won t help you. IF you did not notice yet, they are only acting as if they compete.

Their "breakthroughs" come in sync, same as with ATI and NVIDIA in sync dissabling the real horizontal span in windows 7 to mark older cards obsolete and push their 3d vision surround and eyefinity bullshit and the matrox triple2go obsolete hardware which can be done way better via drivers.

This kills our environment, because if you produce a boing 747 but because you want to meet a lower price segment, you pull out all seats but two, and fill the rest with foam, you end up using the same materials but creating a much less efficient plane.

Same goes for the castrated intel CPU. It is the same components and energy used to produce this CPU, but it has been tuned down similar to a boing 747 with just 2 seats.


You might ask, why they can afford to castrate their products and sell them so much cheaper.

Probably because the production cost is minimal and they just try to grab the money of everyone, by releasing the same product at different price ranges.

It would cost them more to actually design a smaller CPU using up less silicon i guess. The process of using photo-lithography on manufactured silicon is not new and not expensive. The design is what is supposed to be expensive, which however also has been automated to a point where it s cheap.

So now that everything is cheap, a way to maximize profits, preferably with one design only, as this can be manufactured in mass at the same plant has to be found.

How do we do that? If we release a hardware part which cost us $10 to produce at $20, then everyone will buy it, including the filthy rich, and the market has been satisfied.
A better solution, is to take the same hardware part, castrate a few batches which you sell at $20 and make a range of uncastrated at up to $500 at exactly the numbers you expect there is enough richer people out there to buy those.

Now in a world with real competition, the competition would poop in the party and sell all it s hardware un- castrated. It would instead of selling the same card at $500, just bring out x2 and x4 cards with 4 chips on one card, for those who want to spend more and actually get some real value for their money.

 

[whitey_rolls]

I'd rather they just sold the unlocked version for $50.00 more and that's what they should do.

Nickle and diming their clients in this way will just piss people off.