Intel wants $50 to software unlock CPU features [Archive]

x88x

09-20-2010, 01:11 PM

My understanding is that this is only (atm) applying to certain i3 models.
Actually, they're Pentium chips, not i-series. Think like the position the Pentium D or the Celeron filled (idk if they've dropped the Celeron yet). They're the bottom of Intel's barrel atm, which makes the software unlock price even more ridiculous. I can't find an actual retail listing for either, but according to this article (http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901), the G9650 only has an MSRP of $87 to begin with...so you'd be shelling out 57% of the price that you paid for the CPU just to unlock features that the hardware already supports!

If your budget is tight, you get the best you can, and then later on, you can upgrade the cpu for $50.
As I mention above, the problem is that it's not a real upgrade. The hardware that they sold you originally already supports the features, they're just enabling them with a software patch. Think of it like this; you just bought a new car for, say, $10,000. You're driving around, happy, and then you realize that you can't actually use 5th gear and only one of your wheels is getting power. So, you take it back to the dealership and they tell you: "Oh yeah, the transmission and drivetrain are already set up to go into 5th gear and give power to both rear wheels, but that's disabled in your car. If you pay us another $5,700 we'll enable it though." Completely ridiculous, right? Plus, the fact that they'll even do this means that the parts have already been tested to meet their standards for operating with these additional features, so it's not like unlocking a locked core on a 3-core AMD chip or something.

Another thing I just realized...going off the prices listed in the article I linked, getting a G9650 ($87) and then buying the $50 'unlock', makes it more expensive than an i3-540! For context, some specs:
G9650 : 2.80GHz : no hyperthreading : 3MB L3 cache : 73W : $87
unlocked G9650 : 2.80GHz : hyperthreading : 4MB L3 cache : 73W : $87+$50 = $137
i3-530 : 2.93GHz : hyperthreading : 4MB L3 cache : 73W : $113
i3-540 : 3.06GHz : hyperthreading : 4MB L3 cache : 73W : $133

As far as I can tell, this is pure profit for profit's sake, jacking up their bottom line by screwing over the consumer. Just another in a long history of crappy business practices by Intel, and just another reason for my to avoid them in the future.

Oneslowz28

09-20-2010, 02:30 PM

I have been waiting for the beginning of the end.... maybe this is it. If nothing else, Intels recent screw up with letting AMD take over the mid range market, and letting the performance level go stagnant, might give AMD the space they need to reclaim the top spot.

I completely agree with Joe's comment about this type of thing happening when you start doing business with crapple. Something tells me Jobs had a hand in this idea.

mDust

09-21-2010, 05:04 PM

I don't think it's too evil. I'd support it if the performance difference was larger, but $50 for that meager improvement? Nah.

I think if they locked some features on a chip and allowed me to pay less for it, I'd buy a more expensive chip and then upgrade it later if I so desired. I'd agree to do that.

Think of it like a credit card. You use a credit card to buy things that you don't have money for at the moment...such as a CPU. Intel is allowing you to purchase a chip that you cannot afford and charge you a little more for the convenience only if you want more power. If you don't need the power, hey, you just got a cheap chip!

I've been waiting for a company to do this with chocolate chip cookies for decades. I pay for a cookie with only a few chips, and then upgrade it when I get home! Profit!:) What?

Luke122

09-21-2010, 05:22 PM

As I mention above, the problem is that it's not a real upgrade. The hardware that they sold you originally already supports the features, they're just enabling them with a software patch. Think of it like this; you just bought a new car for, say, $10,000. You're driving around, happy, and then you realize that you can't actually use 5th gear and only one of your wheels is getting power. So, you take it back to the dealership and they tell you: "Oh yeah, the transmission and drivetrain are already set up to go into 5th gear and give power to both rear wheels, but that's disabled in your car. If you pay us another $5,700 we'll enable it though."

I dont think that's quite an accurate analogy. Think of it more like you bought a cheap car, and it works fine, but for an extra $5700, you can get more power and performance from it. Sure the hardware is there and capable of it already, but you are paying to enable it. Sounds a lot like a ecm upgrade to me; diesel engines in particular.

Why bother buying the cheapo in the first place? AH HA! I think it's part of Intel's push to drive more sales towards higher performance models. I'm not really agreeing with the practice, but I understand. Chris Rock knows what I'm talking about. :)

x88x

09-21-2010, 06:21 PM

Sure the hardware is there and capable of it already, but you are paying to enable it.
That's the whole problem I have with it; you're paying the same for the hardware, but then paying Intel for the 'privilege' to use it to its actual capabilities. To use your analogy of an ECM, it's like if they sold you the car with it already installed and programmed, but wouldn't let you turn it on until you pay them more. That's crap, you already bought it, just flip the damn switch!

I guess my point is, when I pay somebody (be it a person or a company), I expect to receive something from them that I did not already posses. That may be a product, it may be a service, whatever. In this case, I'm paying them to let me use something I already bought from them. It's like in Windows 7 Starter, where it won't let you change the background. Why won't it let you change the background? Is it because it's not possible? No! It's because somebody somewhere decided that they could use that as a way to squeeze more money out of their customers by disabling something for no other reason than to try and convince the person who is buying the product that it's not good enough and they need to buy something else.

The most obvious proof of this (imo) is the pricing. Unless they make the G9651 less than $50 (which I'm sure it won't; it'll probably cost at least as much as the G9650), they're just squeezing money out of people who either don't have it in the first place or don't know any better. If you're buying the bottom-end chip, it's either because you didn't know what was in the computer that you bought or because you can't afford a better chip. If you then want to "upgrade" you chip with this crap, you end up spending more than a better chip would have cost you in the first place.

It's like if they were selling bottled water: a 24oz bottle costs, say, $2.50 and a 32oz bottle costs $4. The 24oz seems like the better deal, right? But it turns out that the 24oz bottle locks the spigot closed when it reaches 8oz left. Oh, but don't worry, you can 'unlock' that water for just $1.75! That's a lot less than a whole new bottle, right? Great deal! ...but wait, you just paid $4.25 for 24oz of water when you could have paid $0.25 less for 8oz more. Oh, but you didn't have $4 when you bought the first bottle; you needed water now, and you only had $2.50!

At the end of the day though, no matter how bad (or not) we think it is, I'm sure diluzio's right...somebody'll RE it as soon as it comes out (if not sooner), and we'll have a brief period of low-mid-end chips available for the price of a low-end chip.

OvRiDe

09-21-2010, 09:39 PM

Doesn't AMD do the same thing when they sell you a Quad core but call it a "Black Edition" Tricore, that can be unlocked? :whistler: Or even just a unlocked multiplier? They don't use a different dye for the Black Edition CPUs.

Its all marketing anyways. This is so that you can go to your local big box store and they can have an SKU for an upgrade. They will make great Christmas presents. I have a feeling we will seem stuff like "Free Upgrade (50 value)" next to a bunch of Desktop computer ads in the circulars.

The one thing I see here is all the people saying.. I am already buying a piece of hardware that has the capability but getting charged extra to be able to access all of it.

BUT.. what about all the people that are forced to pay extra for features they may never take advantage of anyways? Some people could argue that they will never need hyperthreading or the extra L3 cache, and not having to pay and extra 50 bucks is awesome for them.

x88x

09-21-2010, 10:06 PM

Doesn't AMD do the same thing when they sell you a Quad core but call it a "Black Edition" Tricore, that can be unlocked? :whistler: Or even just a unlocked multiplier? They don't use a different dye for the Black Edition CPUs.

My take on that is that if you use the unlocked multipliers to overclock it, you're taking it beyond the manufacturer's guaranteed performance, whereas with the Intel thing they have to guarantee the "unlocked' features in every chip regardless of whether the end user chooses to buy the "upgrade" or not. ...though you do have a point about the Black Editions being more expensive for no really good reason, but then Intel does the same thing with they Extreme Edition CPUs, so nobody has the higher moral ground on that one. :(

BUT.. what about all the people that are forced to pay extra for features they may never take advantage of anyways? Some people could argue that they will never need hyperthreading or the extra L3 cache, and not having to pay and extra 50 bucks is awesome for them.

Then wouldn't it be cheaper for Intel to make a cheaper chip that meets these needs? I mean, this thing is basically gonna be a slightly lower clocked i3-530 (an i3-520, say) since they have to certify it to perform at the max settings. ..unless they up the clock a bit in the G9651 to 2.93GHz, in which case it will be an i3-530. :P I suppose it's a kinda like what AMD ended up doing with a lot of the later 3-core CPUs, where they just branded a 4-core as a 3-core and locked one core even though it worked fine...you have to find the balance between the lower cost of just printing more of the same chip, getting less profit per unit selling it as a cheaper CPU, but likely selling more units than you would have if you had kept it as the more expensive CPU that it really is.

OvRiDe

09-21-2010, 11:08 PM

Then wouldn't it be cheaper for Intel to make a cheaper chip that meets these needs?

Actually probably not. The cost savings in not have to retool for a different dye would most likely make it much cheaper in the long run.

But there is also another thing that most don't consider. Businesses. I am not talking about your average small business. For instance my company has 15K+ desktops across the enterprise. My locations have roughly 1700 desktops. If all my desktops were exactly the same, I would have the ability to have a consistent image for all machines, and software deployments would be more consistent. The problem is that not all of my users are the same. Where as the majority of them do not need the extra performance, there are several that could use it, or require it. An extra 50 bucks later they are still on the same desktop as all the others, and cruising along with the added performance. The same could be used for promotions or shifts in job functions. If someone has a change in roll and will need the added performance, normally the company would need to buy a complete new desktop unit, not to mention the installation and switch over time that would be needed. Instead the upgrade could be deployed along with any other software changes they may need for that roll to their existing machine, meaning much less time spent making the changes. Even on a more global situation, say one of clients deploys a new tool that will need the added resource. We have around 1550 machines used by the agents. $50 x 1550 is 77.5K dollars. New desktops at say $400 a piece would be $620K. Not to mention all the man hours required to receive, stage, image, migrate, and deploy that many workstations. I don't know if any of you have done this but .. it takes quite a while to just unbox 1000 PC's. :)

I would consider us a medium to large company. Now take companies like EDS or American Airlines where they run COE's (Consistent Office Environments) and order 100's of thousands of PC's and warehouse them for deployment over 3-5 years. The benefits to them would be exponential compared to the company I work for.

We as enthusiasts tend to look and apply everything to our applications. There are plenty of reasons behind these kinds of moves that make a whole lot more sense from other aspects. Intel has been around for a while, and it wasn't because they made a slew of bad decisions. Some of them may just be outside our realm of experience.

x88x

09-22-2010, 12:31 AM

Hmm, I suppose you make a good point about the enterprise environment...though it still irks me for plenty of reasons that I won't rehash.

Intel has been around for a while, and it wasn't because they made a slew of bad decisions.

I never said it was a bad business decision. ;) I'm sure they'll makes a ton of money off it. I just think it's a crappy thing to do to consumers.

Hmmm, this brings a thought to mind... In the novel Snow Crash, by Neil Stephenson, computers have advanced to the point where a simple wrist computer (think PDA/phone/etc) has orders of magnitude more computing power than most anyone will ever need. ..given such a situation, if the manufacture of these ridiculously powerful computers got to a certain cost and reliability point, I could see companies doing their entire line using a single identical piece of silicon with different parts disabled by firm/software. It'd be like if, say AMD, got their manufacturing down to the point where it cost the same to manufacture a 6-core CPU as it did to manufacture a 2-core (I think already there, tbh), and the success rate reached 100% (not anywhere near there yet...though they're doing better than Intel, iirc, at least on their high-end chips), then they could make their entire line by just making craptons of 6-core CPUs and disabling however many cores wouldn't be used in a given line. Heck, nVidia is kinda doing that now with the GTX400 series. IIRC, there's a single die for "Fermi", and they just separate them out into the different models depending on how many stream processor nodes failed. Don't get me wrong, if a company did what I suggest, it would massively piss me off...until a method of unlocking all the features was leaked/RE'd, in which case I would just buy the $50 cheapo CPU and turn it into the $500 awesome one... :whistler: .. Locking out portions of the chip for power-saving reasons or the like, I would go along with, as long as I could unlock those portions at no additional cost...I just really don't like this almost 'hardware as a service' approach..I bought the CPU, I should be able to use the whole thing without (essentially) buying it again.

OvRiDe

09-22-2010, 01:08 AM

That does brings up an interesting concept. What if Intel decided to just produce a single dye that has say 12 cores. But they basically have feature sets that are unlockable by in place upgrades. So you start out with a basic CPU. For this example say the dual core 2.8Ghz non-hyperthread version is 100 bucks. Your on a limited budget so you start out with this. Later if you would like to go with say a quad core, instead of having to spend 175 bucks on a new CPU and then have to deal with either eating or selling your current CPU, you could just pay a fee of 50 bucks for an upgrade. Later as time goes on .. you have the money to go up to 6 cores for say another 50 bucks, and so on. What if they did the same thing with multipliers and bus speeds.. so for x amount of dollars that 2.8 could become a 3.2 or 4Ghz? You could slowly step up your performance over time with out having to deal with the depreciation of your current cpu on the used market, and eventually end up with the top of the line performance. To be honest this sounds really appealing to me. It seems like its a lot easier to free up fifty to hundred bucks every month or so, then to go through the hassle of buying a whole new CPU if you want to upgrade, AND deal with your current CPU. Also .. you wouldn't need to dismantle your PC to upgrade your CPU or better yet your water loop! :eek:

I dunno this could be the start of something really cool.

EDIT..

Don't get me wrong, if a company did what I suggest, it would massively piss me off...
I believe AMD has been doing similar practices since the days of their 486 and 5x86 chips, along with probably every other chip manufacturer as well. Most of the time they used physical means. I believe it was the early Athlon XP chips that used diodes on the top of the chips for multipliers. You could use pencil lead to complete the traces and change/unlock the multipliers. Its been a while so I may be fuzzy on the details, but that was the jist of it.

SXRguyinMA

09-22-2010, 01:22 AM

very interesting points, I like where this is going :up:

You did shed some light on the other side of things OvRiDe, I was just thinking of most people here and our applications, as you mentioned :D

Oneslowz28

09-22-2010, 01:54 AM

And now like all other great ideas posted in a modding forum, this will be turned into a reality. The question is.. who will steal it and call it their own.

FuzzyPlushroom

09-22-2010, 04:46 AM

So, I buy a new laptop and get a free 'upgrade' (read: unlocking what's already there) as a promotion. Fine - no initial change in my buying experience, really. However...

I see three possible ways of doing this. The most obvious would be including a tiny amount of flash memory inside the CPU die itself, so that once it's unlocked, it's unlocked. I know that heat and size constraints prohibit that option, though. I figure that it's actually a BIOS update, based on the description of and instructions for the tool itself on Intel's website ("After downloading, copy onto a bootable DOS USB drive"); as such, it shouldn't be that difficult to hack. The third option, of course, would involve a specific driver or some such under a operating system, or a tiny partition on the hard drive - and I imagine some folks here remember how well storing the BIOS on the hard drive worked for, say, Packard Bell back in the '90s. There's a reason they're out of business here, but I digress.

The relevant questions are many. What will this CPU appear as in an ordinary motherboard (something other than an Intel DH55*)? (After all, if someone pays for an upgrade and has their motherboard replaced, even with another identical board, the upgrade will no longer exist.) Is this upgrade code stored on a separate EEPROM chip, so that a corrupted/outdated BIOS can be reflashed without losing the upgrade? If not, can the upgrade code be used more than once, and how would this be enforced?

It's a good idea, in theory, for very select markets (OvRiDe's big-business example is the only one I can think of), but I suspect that the implementation is inherently flawed.

x88x

09-22-2010, 12:50 PM

Looking at the idea of having one die for everything, after thinking it through more, I think as long as they couldn't sue people who managed to unlock them without paying them (I'm not sure if the recent 'jailbreaking' thing would affect that or not), I wouldn't have a real problem with it..heck, it would mean I could get a top-of-the-line CPU for the cost of an entry-level CPU, and be guaranteed that it would work properly (unlike unlocking the fourth core in a 3-core AMD chip). ;) Obviously the warranty would be toast, but since when has that stopped us?

The relevant questions are many. What will this CPU appear as in an ordinary motherboard (something other than an Intel DH55*)? (After all, if someone pays for an upgrade and has their motherboard replaced, even with another identical board, the upgrade will no longer exist.) Is this upgrade code stored on a separate EEPROM chip, so that a corrupted/outdated BIOS can be reflashed without losing the upgrade? If not, can the upgrade code be used more than once, and how would this be enforced?

This is a very good point, and one I hadn't thought of...would it only be unlockable on certain chipsets (which would invariably only be Intel chipsets, at least at first)?

mDust

09-23-2010, 07:46 PM

I'm thinking that the record of what chip you unlocked and what parts you unlocked would be stored in a digital 'locker' similar to what Steam and Microsoft do with games/software. It wouldn't have to be much different than flashing your BIOS. They could lock and unlock it mechanically instead of digitally. Just send the right commands to the chip and switches close. By making the switches internal or spraying some sort of lacquer over them, they can prevent users like x88x from getting his free upgrades... Don't worry x88x, I'm only saying this so when the bigwigs at Intel read my post they'll think it's safe to release these chips. We'll hack them later.:banana:

x88x

09-23-2010, 08:40 PM

We'll hack them later.:banana:

Heheh, sounds like fun. I mean, come one...if all it takes is a small piece of software, run while in the OS, (https://retailupgrades.intel.com/Page.aspx?Name=Upgrade) to unlock it, it can't be all that hard to RE. I'm sure there are ways of making it more difficult, but I hold by the same mantra that has led the creators of DRM defeating software for years...if they can unlock it then so can we. :twisted:

mDust

09-24-2010, 01:57 AM

Heheh, sounds like fun. I mean, come one...if all it takes is a small piece of software, run while in the OS, (https://retailupgrades.intel.com/Page.aspx?Name=Upgrade) to unlock it, it can't be all that hard to RE. I'm sure there are ways of making it more difficult, but I hold by the same mantra that has led the creators of DRM defeating software for years...if they can unlock it then so can we. :twisted:

Haha! I didn't know it was something already on the market...I thought they were just testing the waters.

Xpirate

09-26-2010, 10:16 AM

x88x's car and water bottle analogies are correct. Intel should not do this, but they are.

slaveofconvention

09-26-2010, 10:46 AM

OK for my 2c. I utterly agree with this practice. It isn't like intel are planning on charging you for something top of the line, then downgrading it - the original price will reflect the performance of the CPU in the state it is when you buy it. Intel doesn't owe us a damned thing - you pay $100 and you get $100 worth of CPU - want a $150 CPU? No problem, pay the difference and you get it. Most peoples complaints on this matter seem to be that they think by buying the unit in the first place, they are utterly entitled to every possible use of that unit when, in effect, what intel is doing is selling a level of performance as opposed to a piece of silicon.

I don't remember people complaining when Microsoft released Vista and 7 with the "anytime upgrade" option. That is EXACTLY the same - the software is already there, already part of the OS, but it's turned off unless you pay for it. Before anyone starts with "yeah but you're paying for a licence to use it, not actually owning it" I think that's just semantics. You're paying for the benefit you get from something. If you want a small benefit, you get to pay a small price. If you want a big benefit, then you pay a bigger price. I have no doubt people will try, and probably succeed in hacking the features, but I doubt intel are going to care much. The kind of people who will take the time and effort to crack into the CPU are going to make up a TINY proportion of the market. I hate to admit it, but we are a pretty insignificant part of the market to the likes of Intel and AMD.

Intel will almost certainly go after companies who build PCS who crack and unlock before sales in the same way the MS used to be much more interested in suppliers of pirated windows than the end users.

On day one, you go out, and you buy a 2 core, 2.8Ghz CPU - and what do you get? A 2 core, 2.8Ghz CPU. Just because it CAN go to 6 core, 3.4Ghz in theory doesn't mean you're entitled to that - you paid for, and got, the 2x2.8....

I really don't understand the problem here. Well maybe I do, maybe it's some people thinking they're entitled to something for nothing, which, I hate to break it to ya, you aren't..... :s

The ONLY downside I can see to this is that, if it goes ahead with success, it'll affect the second hand / used market - there'll be a lot fewer used CPU's in the future than there are now. At the same time, I can see this doing wonders for reliability. If a CPU has a MBTF of 50,000 hours and rated to go up to 6core, 3.4Ghz, can you imagine the MBTF with 1/5 of the heat being produced????

mDust

09-26-2010, 11:48 AM

slaveofconvention

09-26-2010, 01:01 PM

Heck you could even look at it as a totally interest free, "make payments whenever you want to" finance deal with no credit check or proof of earnings, to get the best of the best (albeit eventually).

Twigsoffury

09-26-2010, 01:28 PM

Don't worry it'll be cracked the same day its released.

x88x

09-26-2010, 02:28 PM

I really don't understand the problem here. Well maybe I do, maybe it's some people thinking they're entitled to something for nothing, which, I hate to break it to ya, you aren't..... :s

I disagree. I think it's more of a problem of applying a business practice that has been thoroughly used and proven in the software (Intellectual Property) realm to the hardware (Physical Property) realm, and it really bugs a lot of people (myself included). I can understand the points people are making, and it's definitely a good idea for Intel, but it still bugs me. It's not that I think I'm entitled to something for nothing, it's just that for my entire life (as with most people in the world), when I buy a physical product I expect to be able to do whatever I want with that product, including pushing it to the limits of its manufacturer's design...I don't expect to have to pay the manufacturer again to allow me to do that. Again, I understand the reasons, and there are a lot of good reasons, but it still bugs me. Another thing is that the price doesn't scale (at least with this first one). You mention unlocking it a bit at a time to eventually have top-of-the-line CPU...the problem with that is that if they apply the same sort of pricing that they are with the G9651, by the time you unlock it all the way, you will have paid probably twice as much as if you had bought it outright. So, more like a high-interest loan than a zero-interest loan.

The ONLY downside I can see to this is that, if it goes ahead with success, it'll affect the second hand / used market - there'll be a lot fewer used CPU's in the future than there are now.

That's another thing too. Since the 'unlocking' seems to be stored in the MBB at this time, what happens if your MBB dies? Or if you sell your CPU? You end up with a CPU that's back at the bottom of the barrel. One solution to this would be to register each upgrade code with some sort of unique identifier on each CPU, so then you just have to run the unlocking program on the computer with the new MBB installed, and it detects the CPU's identifier, checks it against Intel's database, and unlocks it to the level that you have paid for, but then you're completely reliant on Intel's servers staying up (granted, I don't expect them to go out of business any time soon, but still). ...actually, along those lines, something else occurs to me...if your CPU dies and you replace it with on that's the same model, when you put it in your MBB does it unlock it to the point where your dead one was or do you just get the base model? ...this could play merry hell with RMAs...