7 ms·

Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do (2010)

26 points by vishal0123 13y ago

gnu8 13y ago
So did this ever blow over or are these upgradable chips still on the market? Did anyone ever hack the upgrade mechanism?
seanalltogether 13y ago
This is a weird concept and I'm trying to figure out how they intend to market it. It seems to me that people buying cpus look for the best performance at the right price, build the machine, and then 3 or 4 years later start the process over again. They won't unlock the cpu right then and there unless it fits within the price range, and they wont do it years later when they're looking to upgrade their rig because they'll haven't forgotten or there will be something much much better.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  IBM has been doing this for Mainframes and pSeries/RISC boxes for a long time. Other mainframes did this as well. On the pSeries boxes, you buy a base level of CPU cores, and you can buy licenses to unlock additional cores for a period of time. It gives you cloud-ish type features (pay for what you need, when you need it) with on-premise hardware. It was a really common licensing model when "data processing" was all about batch workloads. Now that we're building virtualized scale-out systems versus client/server systems with fixed resource requirements, it's a model that can make sense again. If you think about it, EC2 is another way of accomplishing the same thing.
adlpz 13y ago
I assume this is being posted because something similar has been found on Haswell, or whatever. Complaining about this is just not knowing what is going on. Developing a processor is a very complicated matter, and it's financially impossible to develop several models for all the possible different performances. So they just design and build the best possible device (with exceptions of course). Now, I want a not-so-powerful device. Why should I pay the price of all the R&D it took to squeeze the top performance? Maybe I just won't buy it because, hey, it's too expensive. On the other side, I want the top of the line. And Intel spent lots of money developing it, in practice raising the price for everyone else. Shouldn't I be made to pay more to compensate for that? At the end of the day is a matter of creating artificial tiers so different needs pay more or less of a share of the R&D and production cost. Something similar happens when paying $100 for an upgrade from a 16GB to 32GB iPod. The NAND Flash chip costs about $5, but I'm paying the premium of the extra investment the company did, the additional supply chains, etc. Of course this just is invisible to the customers most of the time, and this 'upgrade' cards make it obvious now. Anyone familiar with testing equipment (oscilloscopes, etc...) will know that is a very common marketing technique.
- gcp 13y ago
  The problem with Intel's tiers is that you can't even buy the top of the line device: the concept doesn't exist due to the artificial market segmentation. For Haswell, you can buy the 3.4Ghz one with TSX (4770), or the 3.5Ghz one without TSX (4770K). You cannot have the faster speed and TSX. Why? No reason. Well, someone at Intel figured that people that want to have fast multithreaded software must be business users that don't care about clockspeed. Or something. Don't ask me, I think it's the most bonehead retarded thing ever.
  - adlpz 13y ago
    Maybe it's just that in that case the silicon won't support it, we don't really know how the architecture is. It's also possible that it heats too much with both things. Who knows. Indeed it would be stupid not to offer something, just because. Charge $2000 for it and someone will buy it.
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      Maybe it's just that in that case the silicon won't support it, we don't really know how the architecture is. Indeed it is conceivable that transactional extensions wouldn't work when the clock multiplier is unlocked, but I can't yet imagine why.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - zwegner 13y ago
    (hey gcp!) Thanks for pointing that out, that sucks. I'm glad I'm not much of an overclocker. Also a shame that they don't seem to have plans for any chips with >4 cores, and they're still disabling hyperthreading on a lot of models. It probably won't stop me from buying a Haswell, I'm drooling for all those new instructions...
  - colanderman 13y ago
    Well, you can, it's called the Xeon 1285v3 (3.6 GHz w/ TSX) and it costs $662 (almost twice as much as the 4770K).
jezfromfuture 13y ago
Look if you guys are even goign to argue this is a good thign , ive already given up the war on DLC has been lost and it was won by the stupid.
Ives 13y ago
This is also something that's often seen in oscilloscopes. For example, many Agilent scopes can be upgraded by buying a key. The impact for users is twofold. On the one hand users that don't upgrade still have to pay for a few (unused) components. On the other hand, if users decide they want to upgrade later on, they don't have to throw away/sell their 800$ scope or send it back to the factory. You can buy the basic model when you have the money and upgrade later. It might be a bit awkward to buy something you pretty much own already, but it's still the most rational option. If only humans were more rational...
- joe_bleau 13y ago
  When Tektronix aged my 'scope out of support, the last free firmware update unlocked all those extra cost firmware-locked upgrades. A real class act. I wonder if Intel will do the same a few years down the road?
dbg31415 13y ago
Everyone wants in on DLC, turns out... as much as we all complain about it, we still hungrily buy it. It's greedy, and douchey, but as long as they don't bring back the Celeron I'm OK with them trying this. It isn't the case that your average user today can tell the difference between a computer that's brand new, or that's 4 years old. Chips aren't the bottleneck anyway.
dbg31415 13y ago
Everyone wants in on DLC, turns out... as much as we all complain about it, we still hungrily buy it. It's greedy, and douchey, but as long as they don't bring back the Celeron I'm OK with them trying this. It isn't the case that your average user today can tell the difference between a computer that's brand new, or that's 4 years old. Chips aren't the bottleneck anyway.
Fuxy 13y ago
It's failed model. If the hardware is there people will find a way to unlock it without paying. Haven't license key proven that by now?
Havoc 13y ago
Man AMD had better pull up its socks & provide some competition or there will be much more of this nonsense in future.
timthorn 13y ago
The 386SX and 386DX were exactly the same silicon, but the cheaper model had a fuse deliberately blown to disable the maths coprocessor. It all comes down to whether you take the view that you're buying a piece of silicon, or a slice of R&D.
- Guvante 13y ago
  Note that sometimes this is done for partial failures, for instances if the tests for the maths coprocessor failed, they could just disable that bit and sell it at a lower price point. Historically that happened a lot more than today however.
- mjg59 13y ago
  No, that was the 486SX/DX. No 386s had built-in FPUs - the 386SX was a DX with a 16-bit data bus and a 24-bit address bus.
  - timthorn 13y ago
    Bitrot in my brain... :)
    - sageikosa 13y ago
      I was certain, but I still looked it up ;-). There's nothing like making a mistake on Hacker News to show one how to eat humble pie.
- sageikosa 13y ago
  The 386SX was a 16-bit data bus, the 386 was retroactively labelled 386DX to differentiate it. The 486SX and 486DX were the math co-processor variants of the 486, and they weren't originally "deliberately" blown; they just didn't pass QC and were disabled. Later variants just removed the sections for the FPU from the die.
StewartTBF 13y ago
Functionally, it seems like the logical combination of binning and the market pressure for cheaper machines. (Binning-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning) Say you are Intel and Gateway/Dell/OEM orders X lower-end CPUs... great. However, you don't have enough that binned that far down. So, you have to cripple some ones that are more capable. Do you write it off? No, offer a way to have the end-user pay for the difference! Hey user, you want to unlock the difference between what OEM paid for and what we happened to give them? Here's a painless way to unlock it. Functionally most of the electronics you buy are capable of more. Take a look at this: http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippling-from-nvidia-graphics-card/ http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippli... Okay, so what happens? Either everything's great and you got a free upgrade or the thing has a bad shader or memory chip and now you have an unreliable card. I don't agree with the whole up-sale aspect of it, but, it just strikes me as Intel trying to make back some money on what likely was a crap deal for them.
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Functionally most of the electronics you buy are capable of more. Take a look at this: http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippli.. http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippli.... Okay, so what happens? Either everything's great and you got a free upgrade or the thing has a bad shader or memory chip and now you have an unreliable card. Another thing you might see in a substantially similar hardware product line is that resistors indicate the hardware model, but the lesser models are missing essential components that are present in the higher models. Sure, the firmware will think it's running on the higher model if you swap out the resistors, but it'll promptly crash when it can't find that DAC and EEPROM that are supposed to be there.
mseebach 13y ago
In raging over this practise, there's an unstated assumption: That the alternative is selling the full, unlocked chip at the consumer price point. This is very unlikely to be the case. Like first class on a flight, the pricing of the high end is likely subsidising the lower end. Of course, there's still a profit margin on the low end offering, just not enough that it can stand on its own. So the alternative to this practise is a cheaper high-end chip for everyone, it's more expensive (or same price) high-end chips, which means the low end of the market get's priced out and have to make do with last years model.
- tracker1 13y ago
  Intel is not going to sell you any chip at a loss these days... Intel makes money... they profit... loss-leaders don't give them that.
kvb 13y ago
This is known in the economics literature as product crimping. Perhaps surprisingly, this can make everyone better off (not only Intel but also the purchasers of both the crimped and uncrimped goods). See "Damaged Goods", by Deneckere and McAfee [1]. [1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://www.econ.iastate.edu/faculty/langinier/teaching2005/615-fall2005/paper-hom2/damagegoods.pdf&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm2DuFTO-d5ZF1R3RB3s1CNYNYp1VA&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://www...
- tomjen3 13y ago
  The only thing I can see proof of here is that Intel is a monopoly, as they wouldn't be able to get away with this if they were actually competing against each other.
  - kvb 13y ago
    Did you read the paper? They cited a case where crimping occurred in printers even though IBM and HP were competing. Also, ARM and AMD are producing chips, even if they don't target the same subset of the market. Regardless, the point is that by crimping Intel may be making themselves and their customers better off. Sure, we could posit that with an even more competitive chip market we'd be even better off, but that doesn't negate the fact that we might be worse off than the status quo if crimping were disallowed given the current competitive landscape.
greenyoda 13y ago
Many software vendors do very similar things: by entering a different registration key (that costs more money) you can unlock features of the existing software that were previously unavailable to you. For example, by entering a registration key, you can upgrade "Windows 7 Professional" to "Windows 7 Ultimate" and get more features. It only takes a few moments to do, so it's clear that little or no additional software is being installed on your machine.
tomjen3 13y ago
I don't really mind this, as all it means is that I have to download a program of some torrent and -viola- better performance.

26 points by vishal0123 13y ago

gnu8 13y ago

So did this ever blow over or are these upgradable chips still on the market? Did anyone ever hack the upgrade mechanism?

seanalltogether 13y ago

This is a weird concept and I'm trying to figure out how they intend to market it. It seems to me that people buying cpus look for the best performance at the right price, build the machine, and then 3 or 4 years later start the process over again. They won't unlock the cpu right then and there unless it fits within the price range, and they wont do it years later when they're looking to upgrade their rig because they'll haven't forgotten or there will be something much much better.

Spooky23 13y ago
IBM has been doing this for Mainframes and pSeries/RISC boxes for a long time. Other mainframes did this as well. On the pSeries boxes, you buy a base level of CPU cores, and you can buy licenses to unlock additional cores for a period of time. It gives you cloud-ish type features (pay for what you need, when you need it) with on-premise hardware. It was a really common licensing model when "data processing" was all about batch workloads. Now that we're building virtualized scale-out systems versus client/server systems with fixed resource requirements, it's a model that can make sense again. If you think about it, EC2 is another way of accomplishing the same thing.

adlpz 13y ago

I assume this is being posted because something similar has been found on Haswell, or whatever. Complaining about this is just not knowing what is going on. Developing a processor is a very complicated matter, and it's financially impossible to develop several models for all the possible different performances. So they just design and build the best possible device (with exceptions of course). Now, I want a not-so-powerful device. Why should I pay the price of all the R&D it took to squeeze the top performance? Maybe I just won't buy it because, hey, it's too expensive. On the other side, I want the top of the line. And Intel spent lots of money developing it, in practice raising the price for everyone else. Shouldn't I be made to pay more to compensate for that? At the end of the day is a matter of creating artificial tiers so different needs pay more or less of a share of the R&D and production cost. Something similar happens when paying $100 for an upgrade from a 16GB to 32GB iPod. The NAND Flash chip costs about $5, but I'm paying the premium of the extra investment the company did, the additional supply chains, etc. Of course this just is invisible to the customers most of the time, and this 'upgrade' cards make it obvious now. Anyone familiar with testing equipment (oscilloscopes, etc...) will know that is a very common marketing technique.

gcp 13y ago
The problem with Intel's tiers is that you can't even buy the top of the line device: the concept doesn't exist due to the artificial market segmentation. For Haswell, you can buy the 3.4Ghz one with TSX (4770), or the 3.5Ghz one without TSX (4770K). You cannot have the faster speed and TSX. Why? No reason. Well, someone at Intel figured that people that want to have fast multithreaded software must be business users that don't care about clockspeed. Or something. Don't ask me, I think it's the most bonehead retarded thing ever.
- adlpz 13y ago
  Maybe it's just that in that case the silicon won't support it, we don't really know how the architecture is. It's also possible that it heats too much with both things. Who knows. Indeed it would be stupid not to offer something, just because. Charge $2000 for it and someone will buy it.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Maybe it's just that in that case the silicon won't support it, we don't really know how the architecture is. Indeed it is conceivable that transactional extensions wouldn't work when the clock multiplier is unlocked, but I can't yet imagine why.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zwegner 13y ago
  (hey gcp!) Thanks for pointing that out, that sucks. I'm glad I'm not much of an overclocker. Also a shame that they don't seem to have plans for any chips with >4 cores, and they're still disabling hyperthreading on a lot of models. It probably won't stop me from buying a Haswell, I'm drooling for all those new instructions...
- colanderman 13y ago
  Well, you can, it's called the Xeon 1285v3 (3.6 GHz w/ TSX) and it costs $662 (almost twice as much as the 4770K).

jezfromfuture 13y ago

Look if you guys are even goign to argue this is a good thign , ive already given up the war on DLC has been lost and it was won by the stupid.

Ives 13y ago

This is also something that's often seen in oscilloscopes. For example, many Agilent scopes can be upgraded by buying a key. The impact for users is twofold. On the one hand users that don't upgrade still have to pay for a few (unused) components. On the other hand, if users decide they want to upgrade later on, they don't have to throw away/sell their 800$ scope or send it back to the factory. You can buy the basic model when you have the money and upgrade later. It might be a bit awkward to buy something you pretty much own already, but it's still the most rational option. If only humans were more rational...

joe_bleau 13y ago
When Tektronix aged my 'scope out of support, the last free firmware update unlocked all those extra cost firmware-locked upgrades. A real class act. I wonder if Intel will do the same a few years down the road?

dbg31415 13y ago

Everyone wants in on DLC, turns out... as much as we all complain about it, we still hungrily buy it. It's greedy, and douchey, but as long as they don't bring back the Celeron I'm OK with them trying this. It isn't the case that your average user today can tell the difference between a computer that's brand new, or that's 4 years old. Chips aren't the bottleneck anyway.

dbg31415 13y ago

Fuxy 13y ago

It's failed model. If the hardware is there people will find a way to unlock it without paying. Haven't license key proven that by now?

Havoc 13y ago

Man AMD had better pull up its socks & provide some competition or there will be much more of this nonsense in future.

timthorn 13y ago

The 386SX and 386DX were exactly the same silicon, but the cheaper model had a fuse deliberately blown to disable the maths coprocessor. It all comes down to whether you take the view that you're buying a piece of silicon, or a slice of R&D.

Guvante 13y ago
Note that sometimes this is done for partial failures, for instances if the tests for the maths coprocessor failed, they could just disable that bit and sell it at a lower price point. Historically that happened a lot more than today however.
mjg59 13y ago
No, that was the 486SX/DX. No 386s had built-in FPUs - the 386SX was a DX with a 16-bit data bus and a 24-bit address bus.
- timthorn 13y ago
  Bitrot in my brain... :)
  - sageikosa 13y ago
    I was certain, but I still looked it up ;-). There's nothing like making a mistake on Hacker News to show one how to eat humble pie.
sageikosa 13y ago
The 386SX was a 16-bit data bus, the 386 was retroactively labelled 386DX to differentiate it. The 486SX and 486DX were the math co-processor variants of the 486, and they weren't originally "deliberately" blown; they just didn't pass QC and were disabled. Later variants just removed the sections for the FPU from the die.

StewartTBF 13y ago

Functionally, it seems like the logical combination of binning and the market pressure for cheaper machines. (Binning-> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning) Say you are Intel and Gateway/Dell/OEM orders X lower-end CPUs... great. However, you don't have enough that binned that far down. So, you have to cripple some ones that are more capable. Do you write it off? No, offer a way to have the end-user pay for the difference! Hey user, you want to unlock the difference between what OEM paid for and what we happened to give them? Here's a painless way to unlock it. Functionally most of the electronics you buy are capable of more. Take a look at this: http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippling-from-nvidia-graphics-card/ http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippli... Okay, so what happens? Either everything's great and you got a free upgrade or the thing has a bad shader or memory chip and now you have an unreliable card. I don't agree with the whole up-sale aspect of it, but, it just strikes me as Intel trying to make back some money on what likely was a crap deal for them.

nitrogen 13y ago
Functionally most of the electronics you buy are capable of more. Take a look at this: http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippli.. http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18/hack-removes-firmware-crippli.... Okay, so what happens? Either everything's great and you got a free upgrade or the thing has a bad shader or memory chip and now you have an unreliable card. Another thing you might see in a substantially similar hardware product line is that resistors indicate the hardware model, but the lesser models are missing essential components that are present in the higher models. Sure, the firmware will think it's running on the higher model if you swap out the resistors, but it'll promptly crash when it can't find that DAC and EEPROM that are supposed to be there.

mseebach 13y ago

In raging over this practise, there's an unstated assumption: That the alternative is selling the full, unlocked chip at the consumer price point. This is very unlikely to be the case. Like first class on a flight, the pricing of the high end is likely subsidising the lower end. Of course, there's still a profit margin on the low end offering, just not enough that it can stand on its own. So the alternative to this practise is a cheaper high-end chip for everyone, it's more expensive (or same price) high-end chips, which means the low end of the market get's priced out and have to make do with last years model.

tracker1 13y ago
Intel is not going to sell you any chip at a loss these days... Intel makes money... they profit... loss-leaders don't give them that.

kvb 13y ago

This is known in the economics literature as product crimping. Perhaps surprisingly, this can make everyone better off (not only Intel but also the purchasers of both the crimped and uncrimped goods). See "Damaged Goods", by Deneckere and McAfee [1]. [1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://www.econ.iastate.edu/faculty/langinier/teaching2005/615-fall2005/paper-hom2/damagegoods.pdf&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm2DuFTO-d5ZF1R3RB3s1CNYNYp1VA&oi=scholarr http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?hl=en&q=http://www...

tomjen3 13y ago
The only thing I can see proof of here is that Intel is a monopoly, as they wouldn't be able to get away with this if they were actually competing against each other.
- kvb 13y ago
  Did you read the paper? They cited a case where crimping occurred in printers even though IBM and HP were competing. Also, ARM and AMD are producing chips, even if they don't target the same subset of the market. Regardless, the point is that by crimping Intel may be making themselves and their customers better off. Sure, we could posit that with an even more competitive chip market we'd be even better off, but that doesn't negate the fact that we might be worse off than the status quo if crimping were disallowed given the current competitive landscape.

greenyoda 13y ago

Many software vendors do very similar things: by entering a different registration key (that costs more money) you can unlock features of the existing software that were previously unavailable to you. For example, by entering a registration key, you can upgrade "Windows 7 Professional" to "Windows 7 Ultimate" and get more features. It only takes a few moments to do, so it's clear that little or no additional software is being installed on your machine.

tomjen3 13y ago

I don't really mind this, as all it means is that I have to download a program of some torrent and -viola- better performance.