{"id":1326,"date":"2010-09-19T22:00:57","date_gmt":"2010-09-19T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/?p=1326"},"modified":"2010-09-19T22:01:33","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T12:01:33","slug":"would-you-pay-to-unlock-the-full-potential-of-your-cpu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/would-you-pay-to-unlock-the-full-potential-of-your-cpu\/","title":{"rendered":"Would You Pay to Unlock the Full Potential of your CPU?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In an article published on Neowin<\/a>, 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).<\/p>\n

Particularly, with the popularity of netbooks and recent economic pressures experienced there has been a huge focus on budgets from a consumer perspective.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It reminds me of how early AMD Athlon CPUs had their clock multipliers limited but you could unlock them<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[399,333,335,332,18],"tags":[2316,929,310,102,930,2309,86],"class_list":["post-1326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amd","category-cpu-processors-technology","category-intel","category-processors","category-technology","tag-amd","tag-athlon","tag-cpu","tag-dvd","tag-hdcp","tag-intel","tag-netbook","item-wrap"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mingersoft.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}