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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Intel Wants $50 for Software Unlock of CPU Features

The Pentium G6951 dual-core LGA1156 processor may not have made any headlines when it was known to be almost identical to the Pentium G6950, until now. Inteldesigned the G6951 to support "hardware feature upgrades" by purchasing them and enabling them using a software, so users with this processor installed can upgrade their systems by enabling that are otherwise locked for the SKU. The $50 upgrade fetches support for HyperThreading Technology, enabling four threads on the processor; and unlocks the disabled 1 MB of the L3 cache (Clarkdale has 4 MB of L3 cache, of which 1 MB is disabled on the Pentium SKUs).

There isn't much value in buying a $99 Pentium G6951 and the $50 Upgrade Card upfront, but later down the line, companies can opt to mass-upgrade system performance without touching any of the hardware inside. The service works by the purchase of an upgrade key that the user has to feed into the software, which is then verified by Intel's activation server, following successful verification, the software unlocks the processor's features. This is a one-time process, portable between software reinstallations.

15 comments:

  1. Oh shit I heard of this earlier, I was like fuck no they wouldn't do that.... Then I looked it up and was kinda pissed. It's like selling a car and going "Oh yeah those wheels are 100$ extra." No way.

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  2. Got to lvoe money grubbing but damn. Im an AMD Fanboy myself, thought Intel pinless processors are nice.

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  3. I don't know what to say about this.

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  4. I usually switch between AMD and Intel each build.. but looks like for the first time I'll be going AMD twice in a row XD

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  5. I like AMD personally, but I think its only a matter of time before you can get a pirate copy of one of those keys...

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  6. Wow, that's really bullshit.

    vgleaks.blogspot.com

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  7. upgrading that way, blows my mind how far we've come.

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  8. Dude, great post. Believe it not, it really helped me a bit :D

    Following

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