Intel Core Unlocking...

With a twist.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/i...can-already-d/

Not sure if this has been posted ? The line about it being akin to DLC made me chuckle, the reality that Intel actually do this not so much.

But they already sell you a down clocked CPU for less than if they fused a different multiplier onto it.

I think it comes down to price. If you could buy a cheap dual core now, with the option of unlocking it into a 4 core and then maybe 6 core later it might help on up-front costs and be welcome. People buy things like insurance in instalments, why not your CPU and unlock bits as you go? If there is not too much overall premium over the cost of just buying the final CPU outright then it is a useful tool. If Intel gouge the punters too hard, then it will be as popular as Intel Overdrive all those years ago (where for the cost of the overdrive CPU you could buy a replacement normal CPU with change left over for a motherboard).

Hope for their sake they have gotten their cryptography right though, the CPU remarking industry used to be worth millions so there are organisations out there that will want to crack this!

Of course this is standard in the mainframe world. Buy a mainframe from IBM, and they'll often overconfigure it. This is a win-win solution for mainframes, as costs are cut by being able to customise a standard hardware configuration in software, and customers really like the fact that if they ever do need to upgrade, they've already got the hardware physically installed, and they may even not need any OS downtime to unlock the extra processors.

Doesn't make sense for desktops, but for servers it's really good.

Of course, with enterprise environments, you don't need to work very hard to lock down the extra hardware, as the customer will always know that their support license they're paying so much for will be invalidated if they use more than they've paid for.

In part this sounds like an intresting way to get around the bining & quoter issue where working chips can end up binned down mainly because of production quoter issues.
chip manufactures are normally locked into production quoters based on predicted failier rates, so if a run proves better than expected they end up having to bin down working chips to meet quoters agreed on before the production run started.

What's more intresting is that this card is brand pc specific, so it looks like intel have taken all the working binned down chips and given them to one OEM so they can charge for unlocking with a garantied success rate.
It's probably worked through a custom BIOS which means that non-branded systems will not have this option, which is in a way good because if all the working binned chips have gone to the OEM then the chances of getting an unlockable retail cpu will be far lower.

The upshot is Intel still meets their production quoters, the OEM system builder gets a extra "feature" and both Intel and the OEM get an additional revenue stream.

IMO it's a rather mercenary way to claw back some extra money and a continuation of the dumbing down of pc's, edgeing people away from having any idea of what's inside their pc and how it works towards prebuilt systems.

How long will it be before this system gets reverse engineered and the upgrades become free?

Unlocking hyperthreading is not a great "upgrade", that an additional core or two would be. Users that buy core i3 processors are hardly heavy users, they already have a dual core chip so I don't expect them to notice any difference at all. I have never been impressed by hyperthreading.

It's not the hyperthreading but the extra cache that's going to be making the difference here

Imagine; you unlock your chip and then transfer it to another mobo. Will that chip still be unlocked?

given that these processors are only available to OEMs and system integrators for pre-built computers, I don't think that's a likely scenario ;)

As to whether the chip remains unlocked: that would depend entirely on whether the locking is done in the BIOS or on the processor itself. If the unlocking is available on PCs from a number of different OEMs I'd guess it's the latter, and that the chip would remain unlocked if transferred between computers, but the only way to find out for sure would be to poke Intel with big sticks until they fess up ;)

But, as I say, I think that scenario is unlikely...

Surely if you get the code depending on the CPU, then if you did transfer and it was *locked* again, then you could just get the code again and unlock?

I'm not sure but I imagine you can't physically change the chip from software. It must be bios driven based on a code on the the CPU?

OK so OEMs are going to supposedly have all the chips; It could be interesting to see how this one pans out.