In an article published on Neowin, it appears that Intel is looking at shipping some processors with some capabilities initially locked that can be unlocked later on for a nominal fee. It does look like this is being aimed at the low to mid-range market where a performance boost might be more readily noticed than at the high end of town (not to mention the ire it would draw from the enthusiast market).
Particularly, with the popularity of netbooks and recent economic pressures experienced there has been a huge focus on budgets from a consumer perspective.
I can’t help but feel pessimistic about such an approach though. Things like copy protection and encryption end up being cracked (such as DVD encryption and HDCP earlier this week) so I could see this sort of thing being the target of hackers keen for a “free upgrade”. I’m not sure that the “in-fill cost” to unlock additional CPU functionality or power would be classified as a license but it could be a bit of a grey area.
It reminds me of how early AMD Athlon CPUs had their clock multipliers limited but you could unlock them by joining the L1 bridges on the CPU with a pencil or some sort of conductive ink. Getting extra performance by re-enabling something that was disabled was very much the bread and butter of the overclocking community.
I guess Intel gets some marks for attempting to innovate but I’m not convinced that it will be such a runaway success for them.
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