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Intel's anti-upgrade tricks defeated with Kapton tape
- peepeepoopoo74 2y agoAh yes, I am reminded of the age-old internet proverb: "A socket change a year keeps the goyim in fear."
- SomeoneFromCA 2y agoThe worst intel did is fusing off AVX512 in Alder Lake. It is the _ONLY_ consumer grade CPU family with hardware AVX512 FP16 support. Fantastic instruction set for machine learning.
- chmod775 2y ago> Contrasting this to AMD’s high degree of CPU support on even old Ryzen motherboards, it’s as if Intel introduced this incompatibility intentionally. That is because they introduced it intentionally. They don't give a rat's ass about how this screws people over and creates e-waste. Pencil pushers at Intel just couldn't figure out how to put consumer goodwill on a balance sheet.
- scrlk 2y agoReminds me of the "pencil trick" to overclock CPUs in the late 90s/early 00s. You'd rub a pencil over contacts on the CPU to bridge them, which would unlock the clock multiplier.
- laweijfmvo 2y agoand the initial "fix" from AMD to stop it was to laser burn a trough between the contacts, so that you couldn't draw a line between them!
- wrigby 2y agoI remember this being the way to unlock Athlon XP’s (though if you bought the mobile version, which used the same socket and ran just fine in a desktop motherboard, they came unlocked from the factory).
- jsheard 2y agoYou rarely see those kinds of unlocks anymore unfortunately, since they started using eFuses to disable parts of the chip permanently. It still happens occasionally though, like the time when AMD decided to add a 4GB SKU alongside the originally planned 8GB SKU of one of their graphics cards so late in development that they didn't have time to actually change the hardware, so all of the initial batches had 8GB installed with half of it disabled in the VBIOS where applicable, which was easy to reverse by flashing the VBIOS from the 8GB version. The one time in history when "download more RAM" wasn't just a meme.
- lithos 2y agoIBM servers this was the default as well. Where the difference between ram amounts on AS400 systems was a phone call to enable more.
- jsheard 2y agoHaving dormant hardware which is intended to be unlockable later is a separate thing, which is rarely seen on consumer hardware. Intel tried it a while ago but the backlash was so severe that they gave up and reverted to permanently fusing off the silicon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service I believe they still have something similar which allows Xeon processors to be upgraded in the field though. Car manufacturers have been testing the waters too, e.g. installing heated seats in every model and making them a paid software unlock for lower end models that didn't have that option enabled from the factory.
- hinkley 2y agoIBM’s problem was going to be inventory, labor, scheduling, and transportation costs. Your mainframe is slow and IBM is going to charge you 6 hours of labor to come out for 90 minutes next Friday, or we can deal with it over the phone. I can’t recall but did IBM use that extra hardware for physical redundancy in case of hardware failures? I know they researched letting equipment die and coming out and replacing it after multiple failures instead of single ones, but I don’t know if they applied that to shipping mainframes, to regular rackmount hardware, or just in Research.
- whalesalad 2y agoTaking me back to the Athlon XP Barton days
- benreesman 2y agoLikewise the felt marker on DVDs during the DRM Wars.
- StimDeck 2y agoI feel like I should know what this is a presence to.
- benreesman 2y agohttps://www.wired.com/2002/05/cd-crack-magic-marker-indeed/ https://www.wired.com/2002/05/cd-crack-magic-marker-indeed/
- stronglikedan 2y agoThey do just that at the end of the embedded video.
- sokoloff 2y agoThis is dated 2024, but is talking about Intel 8th gen chips released in 2017.
- causality0 2y agoAnd? Submissions talking about the architecture of the Game Boy don't need to be tagged 1989.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoThe hackaday post is from this year, and talks about forum threads/guides from 2019. I would guess the author only learned about it or decided to write about it now. Even if it's not that useful to people nowadays, it's interesting to learn such a thing is possible.
- xxs 2y ago>threads/guides from 2019. 2018, April
- bell-cot 2y agoSounds like good* strategy by Intel. Cheap for them & the MB manufacturers to make a few little changes, all the potential issues with Old MB/New CPU systems are now "sorry, not supported", and the Rebel 0.01% can imagine that they've cleverly won a real victory - which "victory" will barely be a rounding error on any of the Big Players' financials. *"Good" by Capitalist Overlord standards
- yourusername 2y agoBut if i can buy a new CPU for my motherboard i would be almost guaranteed to stay with Intel. Now ever upgrade is a chance to jump ship to the competition. There are probably people on their 3rd AM4 CPU with the same motherboard.
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoIntel only doing one upgrade per compatible mobo is kind of annoying. I had to buy and return a 6000 series CPU just to update my board's firmware so I could use the 7700k I intended to. How's the compatibility on the AMD side? Will a board work enough to upgrade itself with a newer CPU than it launched with?
- toast0 2y agoLast time it was a major problem, AMD had a program to send you a low end old generation processor and you'd send it back when you were done. CPUless flashing is pretty common now though, and inventory is low, so there's less stale bios motherboards out there.
- daneel_w 2y agoI had no problems upgrading from a quad-core Zen 2 to a hexa-core Zen 3 on my particular motherboard (Gigabyte A520M H).
- InvaderFizz 2y agoIf the board supports headless USB bios updates, yes. Those can update the bios without a cpu present.
- graphe 2y agohttps://www.overclock.net/threads/mod-lga775-support-for-lga771-xeon-cpus.1431723/ https://www.overclock.net/threads/mod-lga775-support-for-lga... I did this mod back in the day, can't believe it's been 11 years.
- daneel_w 2y agoI was myself once, before switching to AMD, a user of the related trick where one could run a used $35 quad-core Xeon on e.g. a Core 2 mobo by just switching two pins on the CPU's pin grid with a little sticker. Miles better experience than the $400 Core 2 Quad.
- irisgrunn 2y agoSimilar to how you can use a socket 771 Xeon in a socket 775 mainboard with changing a few pins and mod the bios.
- helf 2y agoI still have a system running a modded xeon in a 775 board lol
- dghughes 2y agoThis reminds me of the olden days (1990s) when people would fill in laser cuts on hobbled CPUs with solder to boost...something. I'm old so l forget.
- userbinator 2y agoIt's interesting how the pins differ between motherboard manufacturers, which suggests they didn't copy Intel's reference schematics completely or used different revisions of them. They used to publish the reference schematics on their site up until the P4 era, but I guess it made things like this too easy.
- StimDeck 2y agoMakes sense in the slow slide of anti repair.
- wannacboatmovie 2y agoIf your system isn't unstable enough... I'm sure you could drop a Ford V8 into a Hyundai with a few simple mods; it doesn't make it an intelligent idea either. But boy would it generate clicks.
- xxs 2y agoIt's an old topic[0], the site does reference it. Back then it was widely discussed in the overclock community. Effectively Intel's [6-10] series are all skylake. Shorting the cpu pins (well LGA) was possible even with a pencil's graphite. [0]: https://community.hwbot.org/topic/175489-asrock-z170-mocf-lives-on-coffee-lake-mods/ https://community.hwbot.org/topic/175489-asrock-z170-mocf-li...
- DarkmSparks 2y agonot saying this contributed significantly to Intels recent $7 billion loss in chip making, just that they probably shouldnt be pushing buyers away quite so hard given their current situation.
- xxs 2y agocoffee lake was the 1st time Intel had to wake up and put more than 4 cores in a (consumer) CPU; so it was a big thing.
- aranchelk 2y agoIt’s called “Coffee Mod”? I would have gone with “Kapton Lake”.
- accrual 2y agoA couple of historical CPU mods similar to this: - AMD K6-2+ can be converted to K6-3+ by moving a 0-ohm resistor under the IHS to unlock the full 256K of L2 cache only present on K6-3+ models. The CPUs were basically all the same and were binned into separate SKUs using the position of this resistor. - AMD K7 (Athlon XP) can be similarly unlocked by bridging conductive pads on the chip using something as common a graphite pencil. - Intel Pentium 3 Coppermine chips could be run on earlier Pentium 2 boards by using a slotket adapter with a modified socket. The socket could sometimes be further modified to support the signaling used by even later P3 Tualatin chips, allowing for Tualatin CPUs to run on 440BX chipsets which were never designed for them. Also needs a BIOS mod and sometimes a VRM replacement.
- litenboll 2y agoIf anybody else wonders why a 0-ohm resistor is a thing, apparently it is because it makes it possible to install a jumper on printed circuit boards with the same equipment that is used for normal resistors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-ohm_link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-ohm_link
- l33tman 2y agoYou put 0-ohms where you think you might at some point want to have something else there like a > 0 ohm resistor or an inductor (for EMI blocking for example), it's much easier to just reprogram the SMD robot than to make a new PCB.
- a1369209993 2y agoThat's accurate, but given the lack of words to the effect of "You can also put", it deserves the clarification that the most common something else is - as the parent suggested - a ∞-ohm resistor, either as a specific component or more commonly in the form of the absense of a component.
- lazide 2y agoResistor shaped wires are also a lot less dangerous than fuse shaped ones. In my experience.
- donatj 2y agoWhat is the financial benefit to Intel in artificially limiting its CPU sockets like this? Logic and reason would have me believe they'd want to sell as many CPUs as possible, and keeping the socket compatible for as long as possible would seem logical. My thoughts on reasons they might have done this. I honestly have no idea, these are just uninformed guesses. - The Charitable Answer: There actually is some sort of minor incompatibility like a voltage difference to some pin where it can still boot but it's maybe not good for the CPU? - The Practical Answer: They make more off the associated sockets/compass direction bridges/etc than they would off increased numbers of CPU upgrades. - The Cynical Answer: Motherboard manufacturers paid them off - The Cynical Practical Answer: They have a schedule for socket changes as some sort of deal with motherboard manufacturers and some engineers decided to do so in the laziest way possible - The Silly Answer: They're an evil corporation and want you to suffer
- ikekkdcjkfke 2y agoI am going to use this listing in my pre-prompt
- Cold_Miserable 2y agoIntel makes money selling motherboard chipsets. There's no excuse, just greed.
- grandinj 2y agoIt costs money to validate a new processor on an old motherboard, and no corp wants to waste money on a product they have already sold.
- josephcsible 2y ago> Don’t get too excited though, as projects like Intel BootGuard are bound to hamper mods like this on newer generations by introducing digital signing for BIOS images, flying under the banner of user security yet again. Alas, it appears way more likely that Intel’s financial security is the culprit. Indeed. The rule of thumb is that if you don't have the ability to turn off some security feature in something you own, then it's really there to make the thing secure against you.
- nottorp 2y ago> Don’t get too excited though, as projects like Intel BootGuard are bound to hamper mods like this on newer generations by introducing digital signing for BIOS images, flying under the banner of user security yet again. Alas, it appears way more likely that Intel’s financial security is the culprit. It's okay, soon we'll lock down all software too in the name of security.
- qwerty456127 2y agoAnti-upgrade is disgusting. Upgradeability is a major reason to buy an tower PC. I would love to pay any remotely-reasonable amount of money for a motherboard which would let me just swap CPUs and cards for 15 years. This is what good motherboards were in the good old pre-PCIe days. It was so lovely to buy the best MB + cheapest everything else, then upgrade whatever as you need and can afford it. I've read Intel even used to make "overdrive" CPUs to fit really completely new generations into old sockets.
- immibis 2y agoOne reason I chose to buy the lowest-end Threadripper instead of the highest end Ryzen. In the future, even if there's never any compatibility with socket sTR5, the parts in the same generation provide a part-by-part upgrade path up to 96 cores, 1TB of RAM (or was it 2TB? I forget), and 128 PCIe lanes.
- qwerty456127 2y agoI would prefer 4 really powerful cores to 96 weaker cores in a CPU though.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y agoThat's going to certainly depend a lot on the tasks you do. An embarrassingly parallel task would work better in the weak 96 cores than 4 strong cores unless those strong cores were literally 24 times more powerful, or if pegging 96 cores causes RAM to be a significant bottleneck.
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