News Intel to offer feature unlocking for selected CPUs

The rip off is that instead of binning they're crippling even more.

Binning just creates another product. Wheras this is intentional crippling.

And yes binning sucks too.

 

The rip off won't necessarily be to end users, we might even get some benefit from it, but distributors are the ones getting completely shafted.

 

This reminds me of a very old joke about IBM.

It was something along the lines of that when they sent an engineer out to upgrade your mainframe, he merely reached inside the cabinet and flipped a switch that sped-up the existing hardware...

This stinks. Hope it fails big-time.

 

If this takes off how long until Intel makes it standard in all their CPU's and we see the end of overclocking.

 

How does binning suck? It increases yield per wafer. Without that, Intel's (imo) already overpriced processors would be even more overpriced. Seems to me that perhaps AMD & Intel both have very high QA thresholds that mean even though I bought a Phenom II clocked at 2.8, it seems perfectly happy running at 3.5. Given AMD's high QA, they didn't think it was performing well enough to release it as a higher-clocked SKU, meaning free upgrade for me. This is a gamble - not every proc will OC the same. I had maybe even odds that pushing it past 3.0 wouldn't happen. Same with other Athlon II/Phenom II procs - if it failed QA as a Phenom II X4, it could be stepped down and down all the way to an Athlon II X2, if two cores and the L3 couldn't pass QA. Better for all of us, I say. At least, until Intel starts releasing what had been the 2600 as the 2800, clocked up 300 MHz for an additional $50, when I could walk even my mom through doing the same thing herself.

This little project of Intel's stinks of 'money grab', in my eyes. But, go figure. A company with so dominant a position in their core market abusing that position? I am shocked! Please, AMD, get Bulldozer out the door and have it not suck!

 

Binning doesn't suck that bad, but sometimes it's like, 1% off and you lose out on an awesome chip.

 

This is an old practice in a new guise. You young'uns may not remember the days of the Intel 386 CPU. Intel sold two flavours, essentially: the 386SX without a floating point processor unit, and the 386DX with. People who had a 386SX could upgrade by buying a 387 co-processor unit, that fitted in a socket alongside the 386SX.

Except that the only difference between a 386SX and a 386DX was that the former had its floating point unit disabled (by zapping it). It was the same chip, deliberately crippled. The 387 was --you guessed it-- a relabelled 386DX. It did not work alongside the 386SX --it took over its role altogether and rendered the 386SX already in the board a useless piece of decoration. You could lift it out the board and the PC would happily continue to work.

Creative Labs did a similar slight of hand with the first Soundblaster. When the prototype was built, Creative Labs decided that it did not look impressive enough to justify the price. The board did not look complicated enough. So they bought a large surplus stock of defunct Phillips ICs very cheaply, and put them on the board. They did not do anything --they weren't even wired into the circuit. They just sat there looking pretty.

Overclocking is often based on the recognition that all grades of a CPU or GPU are basically the same thing but underclocked or with features disabled. Soon people will find a way to hack Intel's unlocking codes also.

 

Not sure I like the idea that when you buy the kit, you are effectively licensing it's use at the speeds it's sold to you at and in order to unlock more power you have to pay more. Sounds like the first step in licensed processors to me. How long before it becomes a monthly fee based on usage and Intel start monitoring your activities....?

 

cheeky ****ers

 

It won't wash. Psychologically speaking people will be happy to pay to get something extra that they did not have before, but they will balk at paying for access to something that they essentially already own.