<story><title>Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do</title><url>http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50-to-unlock-stuff-your-cpu-can-already-d/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text>This is how the industry has always worked. The 486SX was a 486DX with the FPU burned off with a laser. Initially this was to make use of parts with a defective FPU, but parts with perfectly good FPUs were often disabled to fulfil demand.&lt;p&gt;CPUs are produced to a single design within a processor series. The ones with no faults are clocked the fastest and have all their features enabled. Parts with lots of flaws are sold off as crippled budget processors. AMD&apos;s triple-core processors seem a bit strange until you realise that they&apos;re a quad-core part with one faulty core.&lt;p&gt;Overclockers have known about this for years, identifying countless &apos;good batches&apos; of processors and GPUs that were perfectly capable of being clocked faster, but were sold as cheap parts to fulfil demand.&lt;p&gt;If this seems like a con, then the whole IC fabrication industry is a con - artificially crippling ICs has been standard practice for decades.</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do</title><url>http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50-to-unlock-stuff-your-cpu-can-already-d/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gaius</author><text>This is quite normal in high-end kit; If you buy an HP SuperDome for example with half the CPUs they&apos;ll probably actually ship you a fully loaded one with half the chips turned off (still for the price of exactly what you ordered). Then when you want to upgrade you don&apos;t have to take any downtime, you just pay them the difference and they supply you with the codes to unlock it. IBM do this with mainframes all the time.&lt;p&gt;First time I&apos;ve seen this on consumer kit tho&apos;.</text></comment>