Intel processor upgrade cards

drescherjm said:
Both AMD and Intel intentionally disable working features on processors to have many different models at different prices. They have been doing that for many years. How is this practice any different? At least with this method the consumer will be able to undo the disabling at some time.
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The difference is that with the current AMD chips that have cores disabled.. even if you unlock them via one of many motherboards that can currently do so, the chip may or may not function properly. AMD doesn't just lock the chips because they want to make more money by later selling a fake upgrade.

And I bet with these "hobbled" Intel chips that it is nothing more than a hidden BIOS setting.. and with a non-OEM board the CPU probably wouldn't have the features locked out in the first place.

And if I know the OEMs, then they are going to be putting the "hobbled" CPUs in systems that have the bare minimum of everything else as well, which would make a CPU "upgrade" not worth it anyway.

And... what happens if you go to buy an "upgrade card" and the OEM says that in order to do the upgrade you need a better power supply or whatever as well?

I can see the OEMs taking this to a whole new level of trying to rip the consumer off more than they already do.

Paying $50 or whatever stupid price they are going to charge is a rip off to change a BIOS setting or two.

This reminds me of back in the day when HP was trying to sell an MMX enabled printer driver upgrade for $20. Without the MMX driver, the printer software was extremely slow. Upgrade to the MMX driver and it was like night and day when you printed stuff.

edit: changed SSE to MMX.
 
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There is way more than cores being disabled in hobbling. Does amd still have 2, 4 and 8 way SMP chips? These were all identical chips (with the 2 and 4 way hobbled). There also are chips with 1/2 of the cache disabled. Intel does that and I believe AMD does as well. Most of these disabling were not BIOS related they were in programming of the chips (blowing fuses, setting nvram ...) on the CPU itself.
 
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cyclone3d said:
The difference is that with the current AMD chips that have cores disabled.. even if you unlock them via one of many motherboards that can currently do so, the chip may or may not function properly. AMD doesn't just lock the chips because they want to make more money by later selling a fake upgrade.

And I bet with these "hobbled" Intel chips that it is nothing more than a hidden BIOS setting.. and with a non-OEM board the CPU probably wouldn't have the features locked out in the first place.

And if I know the OEMs, then they are going to be putting the "hobbled" CPUs in systems that have the bare minimum of everything else as well, which would make a CPU "upgrade" not worth it anyway.

And... what happens if you go to buy an "upgrade card" and the OEM says that in order to do the upgrade you need a better power supply or whatever as well?

I can see the OEMs taking this to a whole new level of trying to rip the consumer off more than they already do.

Paying $50 or whatever stupid price they are going to charge is a rip off to change a BIOS setting or two.

This reminds me of back in the day when HP was trying to sell an SSE enabled printer driver upgrade for $20. Without the SSE driver, the printer software was extremely slow. Upgrade to the SSE driver and it was like night and day when you printed stuff.
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HP is known for having shitty printer drivers, at least in the consumer arena.

Then again I've had terrible luck with HP when it comes to drivers for anything but my laserjet.

I'm honestly surprised HP didn't come up with this idea on their own. Seems like they could of pulled it off.
 
German Muscle said:
this would be much more successful is done this way. Buy a chip, spend x amount of dollars to turn your 7, 8, or 9 series I5 or I7 into a xxxK model
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I agree. If I could pay $50 and it would allow me to unlock the multiplier on my q9550 I would do it actually. I have overclocked to try it but always set back to defaults for fear that I might have done something wrong or for fear that I didn't realize I was supposed to change some setting, fearing that I might burn out my cpu\mobo, etc.

No matter how much you google overclocking or post topics on this website, you constantly get different responses as to how you should overclock, often saying what the previous person in the post said was wrong. Just let me safely overclock my cpu by changing the multiplier and nothing else and I would be happy. Sounds so much less stressful.

With that said, I am looking forward to eventually buying a Sandy Bridge K series cpu.
 
This tells me that the competition is THAT poor in the PC uproc market... If competition was better, companies wouldn't even dream of something like this.

And no, this is not the same as when Intel or AMD shuts off cores or blocks of a chip... thats part of debugging and is done because something about that 'branch' doesn't meet the minimum specs for the long term life of the chip. Sure, they could leave this part on, but it might fail too soon, and then its a total loss. The same is true of current/speed... sure, they COULD have made it a 4GHz chip, and you could run it like that for a year... but then it would likely fail. This is very common in all parts of the semiconductor industry, even in things like ram, flash memory, etc. Even if the branch they shut off COULD be used, it actually has to hit a much higher spec for current because over time the transistors do wear out. As a transistor switches from its linear region to saturation (its threshold voltage from 'off' to 'on' in digital terms), some electrons 'jump' from the drain to the gate (or rather from the source on their way to the drain but get pulled by the gate), and then when the current drops below saturation again, some electrons get 'stuck' in the oxide layer on their way to the gate as they are making that jump. As this oxide layer gets smaller and smaller, so does its reliability, or rather 'life'. This is why flash memory (the electrons getting stuck in the gate is how a storage cell works) doesn't last as long as it once did, and why MLC SSD's dont last as long as SLC, TLC wont last as long as MLC, etc. Some top spec procs and memory yeilds NEVER hit 100%. That GTX 480 or I7 likely has parts of it that are still deactivated, even though it is supposed to be the best thing possible.

Usually, uproc companies dont just hobble a chip or downclock it for no reason... to create an artificial 'low performer'. Binning is done to balance the performance of the chip with its longevity based on how well it made it through lithography... not just some 'downgrade' for the hell of it. Think about it... they could charge a higher price for the part... yes, yes, I know the conspiracy theories would suggest that this would cause a drop in price for this 'high range' part, so an artificial restriction is created... but if a 25% price drop due to higher supply means double the sales, does that still not make economic sense?

This is something totally different... not for QC, and debugging, but just to show that they can sit back and enjoy a lack of competition. If they can enjoy such high yeilds to pull something like this, then they need a kick in the arse from some competition.
 
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this is so weird. so this is on intel's retail edge:

First, customers must buy the upgrade card at the same time as they buy their PC. They cannot choose to come back later to purchase the upgrade.
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-http://retailedge.intel.com/asmo/WordIndex.aspx

i can still see some point to doing this, but i thought the main focus was that you could try your computer as is and then upgrade later...
 
undertheradar said:
And no, this is not the same as when Intel or AMD shuts off cores or blocks of a chip... thats part of debugging and is done because something about that 'branch' doesn't meet the minimum specs for the long term life of the chip.
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Maybe at first (when yields are low) but later on when demand for the hobbled chips exceed the supply both manufacturers take fully working chips and intentionally hobble them to meet the need.
 
drescherjm said:
Maybe at first (when yields are low) but later on when demand for the hobbled chips exceed the supply both manufacturers take fully working chips and intentionally hobble them to meet the need.
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I have a hard time believing this, but if it is the case, then I would say its a clear indication that there isn't competition in this market. I know that getting convicted of price-fixing usually means some sort of trackable communication between people from Company A and B... but there is such a thing as "not having to say anything to say everything"... Im sure AMD and Intel can communicate to each other in plenty of indirect ways, and it should be seen as price fixing, esp if both companies are doing this. Under circumstances of competition, a company wouldn't be downgrading their product to meet the demand of a 'lower end', they would instead produce the best product they could, and then drop the price to reflect the larger supply.

This 'downgrading', if it is as you say, is a very poor business model that only a market without any real competition would allow.
 
As long as 99.9% of consumers do not know of this practice what do they care.

Also remember that the highest end core and the lowest end core from the same stepping cost exactly the same for the manufacturers to make. So downgrading from a more expensive model to a lesser model that sells much better may make a better profit.
 
drescherjm said:
As long as 99.9% of consumers do not know of this practice what do they care.

Also remember that the highest end core and the lowest end core from the same stepping cost exactly the same for the manufacturers to make. So downgrading from a more expensive model to a lesser model that sells much better may make a better profit.
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That depends on the pricing structure. It is also just as likely that they could make more money by selling their higher end parts for slightly less... making up for the lower margin with higher volume.
 
I believe one other reason is their biggest customers (OEMs) like it that way. They lock the processor down and make large jumps in prices for each processor version that are way more than the difference in price between what they pay for the two chips.
 
This 'lock it down' strategy makes my upper lip twitch. They should just lower the price on the higher part to reflect its supply. Like I said... only when there is a lack of real competition can a company start toying with supply & demand like this. Perhaps its time for an antitrust suit by Uncle Sam.
 
Intel might end up having legal problems with this. I don't think it will get them in trouble, but US courts might not be willing to step in and help them stop people from hacking/unlocking the additional performance. In other words, unlocking them and probably even selling unlocking tools could easily be legal.

Physical products don't get the same treatment as software. You can't license a CPU, and software that's seen as part of a physical thing tends to get treated as a sale of a copy. Lexmark (I think) tried to stick a restrictive software license on printer cartridges and got clobbered in court by a company that was refilling them and resetting the security chip. They even stuck in some encryption and claimed a DMCA violation; lost on that count too. Assuming whatever lock Intel uses doesn't get legally treated as a software license Intel will only have whatever protection patent & copyright law allow, and I just can't see that being enough to stop people from flipping the go-fast bit.
 
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