This is how the industry has always worked. The 486SX was a 486DX with the FPU burned off with a laser. Initially this was to make use of parts with a defective FPU, but parts with perfectly good FPUs were often disabled to fulfil demand.
CPUs are produced to a single design within a processor series. The ones with no faults are clocked the fastest and have all their features enabled. Parts with lots of flaws are sold off as crippled budget processors. AMD's triple-core processors seem a bit strange until you realise that they're a quad-core part with one faulty core.
Overclockers have known about this for years, identifying countless 'good batches' of processors and GPUs that were perfectly capable of being clocked faster, but were sold as cheap parts to fulfil demand.
If this seems like a con, then the whole IC fabrication industry is a con - artificially crippling ICs has been standard practice for decades.
This is different. In order to be upgraded via software, the chip has to be able to function at the upgraded specs. So Intel can't take a broken batch and sell them in this type of machine anymore; they have to put the good one in no matter what.
That's what makes it seem arbitrary and annoying. When you buy a low-spec chip, you get it cheap because it could be defective. But when you buy this, it's perfectly functional, just artificially limited. You aren't helping Intel increase their yield and getting some savings for helping them -- you are just being fucked because they feel like fucking you.
I hated Intel for a long time, but then they started making good products and contributing drivers to Linux... but if they keep this sort of thing up, that goodwill is all going to erode and AMD will have to opportunity to get the enthusiast market again. (Their "we'll sue you for using the HDCP crack" is similarly goodwill-eroding, especially because there is nobody they can even sue.)
From a technical perspective, you're absolutely correct. This is just the logical next step in what's been going on for 20 years.
But from a consumer's perspective, this is a big shift. It's taking what was once an open secret in the industry and shoving it right in the faces of consumers. And I wouldn't underestimate the backlash that can come from something like that.
Reminds me of a 100MHz AMD DX4 I had, circa 1996. I was handed a signal 11 whenever I tried to compile a certain C program.
After going over every inch of the source code and finding nothing wrong, I'd almost given up when I discovered the Sig 11 FAQ (http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/) Clocking the CPU down to 90MHz, no more crashes. Turned out my gray market dealer had sold me an overclocked 90.
Is the fact that Intel is testing the market for this a sign of fabrication processes having improved to the point where yields have outgrown the binning process?
Then again, here's a thought: This test marketing is being done with ancient-architecture Pentium chips. Perhaps this is a consequence of fabricating these chips with less-dense architectures on equipment built for the tolerances required by the latest generation. I don't know enough about the process to say for sure, but I could imagine this resulting in a significant improvement in yields compared to the Pentium's heyday (or to Core i7 chips today).
Well, the simple answer is that is is a con. Disabling hardware capabilities that have already been confirmed by QA is nothing less than an attempt to subvert the laws of supply and demand. The chipmakers are artificially restricting supply of high-end parts in order to maintain the pricing structure they want. They can only get away with it because they are a duopoly, and Moore's Law means that the market forces that could eliminate this practice can't ever catch up.
Don't get me wrong- I get why people are mad. It comes off as racketeering. And I certainly wouldn't want to drop $50 on this. But how is this all that different from software companies that do the same thing?
Your basic subscription to Basecamp, your Photoshop trial, your Windows 7 Home Edition, the Keynote trial that comes with your Mac, your iPhone... they're all capable of doing a lot more (for no extra cost to the company behind it), and you can upgrade for a cost. Another good example that the article mentions is upgrades in video games. This is a pretty common practice for software, so why not hardware?
I don't understand why people are mad, but I do understand why they'd be surprised. The value of the processor is physical. It's protected by property law. At one point of the manufacturing, the processor is purposefully damaged and devaluated to meet market demands. The force of the market is to take goods, damage them, and sell them as inferior goods. That's not what you would expect an otherwise "reasonably functioning" manufacturing economy to incentivize. Taken out of context, some Chinese school child might be learning "in the great American Capitalist system, goods are damaged on purpose to fulfill the optimum of their system: farmers are paid not to plant anything, and chip manufacturers damage their own goods on purpose. Why do they do this? Because the rules of American Capitalism dictate it.
This is quite normal in high-end kit; If you buy an HP SuperDome for example with half the CPUs they'll probably actually ship you a fully loaded one with half the chips turned off (still for the price of exactly what you ordered). Then when you want to upgrade you don't have to take any downtime, you just pay them the difference and they supply you with the codes to unlock it. IBM do this with mainframes all the time.
It seems a little clearer in that case, because mainframe purchases are often pretty explicitly "licenses" rather than "purchases", with an actual contract negotiated between the two companies. IBM used to even come and take back the machine if you stopped paying the annual fees, because you didn't really own it. Consumer hardware is more typically a "sale", though, with no real contract-negotiation phase, and both parties' obligations completed after the sale, except for any warranties.
Couldn't someone theoretically figure out how to enable these features without paying intel? I suspect if intel starts doing this people are going to figure out ways around this.
Practically guaranteed someone will, in no time flat, figure out how to unlock these, and that knowledge will be spread far and wide. There will be a run on the stores for the cheap versions of the chips for this reason, mostly for the home/small shop busines, and then Intel won't do it anymore.
This actually sounds pretty good to me, at least in theory.
Upgrading the CPU is quite costly - you have to take out the old CPU and replace it altogether with a new one. With HDDs you can put the old one in an external enclosure and get some use from it (if the reason you're replacing it isn't failure), and with RAM you might have slots free, so you can keep using the old stuff in addition to the new.
Replaced CPUs tend to be pretty useless. The socket type changes all the time, so you have to eBay it off. Laptops are worse, the CPUs are often soldered on or you can't find replacements.
The only real problem I foresee is that the upgrades are likely going to be of limited use. Hyperthreading gives you a modest boost, anything more than that (clock speed, disabled cores, cache) will drive up power consumption and therefore thermal dissipation. Computers upgradeable in this way will have to contain cooling systems that can cope with the extra heat, even if 90% of people will never upgrade. Might still be feasible for the very low end (Atoms - especially as they're so slow even "normal" people might upgrade) or as CPUs become increasingly modular (either double your CPU or GPU cores in the same package, but not both).
I ♥ AMD when it comes to pricing. Their pricing ratios seem to reflect the realities of production yields rather than market segmentation, and seem more closely correlated with performance. (Desktops; haven't looked at server CPUs lately).
This already happens with cars. For example, the difference between the BMW Mini One and Cooper versions is basically just a different engine map on the CPU, with the former restricted in power and the latter sold at a higher price http://www.newmini.org/content/mini_jan02.htm.
Deleting a certain gene in mice can make them smarter by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found.
We already do this in several industries, so it's nothing to get that upset about. However my larger worry here is that the end-users will now think that software can upgrade their hardware. That alone opens up huge doors in security - users will inadvertently download some tracking program that claims to "upgrade their processor" under the assumption that it does the same thing that intel is doing. Good for computer repair companies and spyware companies, bad for the end user.
* Nvidia intentionally capping floating point precision on 1/8th on their GTX 480 cards, since they cost a fraction of their Tesla cards. Both based on latest Fermi architecture.
* In automotive industry: two otherwise identical cars, but with different versions of engine microcontroller driver, can have many thousands of dollars difference in price.
well, that risk is exactly why they're testing the idea out in low-end markets first - so the people who would break the security for this probably don't even care for this laptop anyways.
DEC used to do this with their hardware, they would cripple an otherwise perfectly functional machine to a cheaper model in order to segment the market.
Of course DEC field engineers did not feel like waiting for the diagnostics to complete so they usually temporarily upgraded the machine to full spec to run their tools, then revert the changes before they left.
This was a funny little dance because some of their customers had clued in to the trick and would do the same thing after the engineers have left, upgrading the machine, only to downgrade it just before a field engineer would arrive.
On the plus side, if this is a software thing I fully expect it to be hacked.
It seems most of the commenters here are overestimating the average consumer.
Excluding the friends I have in the tech industry, not a single one of my friends or family would be able to tell you the different between the CPU and software on their computer.
Besides, which is a better value proposition to the consumer (even if it is not a better value in reality)? Paying $50 for an online CPU upgrade that makes their processor appear 10% faster, or dropping $500+ on a brand new computer to get 40% faster?
My question is, how do you unlock/lock things on the processor via software? Does the CPU have a special instruction that the software triggers? I can't wrap my mind around it.
IBM and Sun Microsystems (one of the first workstation vendors, then seller of servers, especially to finance; now an obscure division of Oracle, a commercial database company) used to do something similar with their biggest machines -- ship a fully populated high-end server, and then sell activation of CPU and memory resources after the fact. I don't know how this was enforced; I think it was mainly done at the OS or firmware level, not at the CPU level.
Intel has been doing this for years with 100% flawless chips. Crippling a chip is part of their business. Their yield management is fantastic such that they run entire wafers at the higher spec then choose what % to sell as lower-end SKUs purely based on demand. Perhaps 10 years ago this was driven by yield quality, but nowadays the number of chips out of a batch that can't pass the test for the top-of-the-line product in that batch are < 1%.
This seems like a great idea to me - sell the slower processor cheaply to the customer with the promise that they can upgrade it later via a simple code with no hardware changes necessary. The customer can get a performance boost later down the line when they have the need/money for it.
Intel gets the opportunity to make a little more money and the customer has a little future proofing - like I said seems like a great idea to me....
Funny related sidenote: the Chinese government was at one point so paranoid about buying processors from western companies that they initiated the creation of their own CPU architecture and began fabrication. They had a fear that outside CPUs could be programmed to be disabled (either remotely or under certain scenarios).
In any case, the processors were reportedly quite bad and the whole thing was eventually dropped.
Well, if it was SAAS (software as a service), no one would have complain about that, right?
With every paid service, one can get a list of features for a fixed price, and then pay more to "unlock" features that that very software can already do.
I wonder why is it easier for people to pay extra for extra in software but not in hardware.
Price differentiation between customer groups. It is not different conceptually from my downloadable software, which is free or $30 depending on whether you want a code which activates an if statement in the bitwise identical executable.
I could charge people $5 for the download and $25 for the code. Not a great idea, I think, but straightforward.
In a well-functioning market every vendor would be frantically scrambling to improve value minus cost, because the delta between the two is the upper bound on their profit. But being in a market with very few competitors and ridiculously high barriers to entry gives Intel the luxury of incurring minor costs to decrease the value they offer, without seeing anyone immediately undercut them on it. If you could run a chip fab in your garage, you wouldn't see price discrimination ploys succeeding.
Any good business seeks to extract the maximum amount people are willing to pay. A single price for all buyers works against that. (I forget the economics term for it.) It's why coupons and discounts for senior citizens exist. Senior citizens and people willing to spend time clipping coupons often can't afford to pay regular prices, so businesses offer discounts where they still make a profit. Some profit is better than none. I'm sure Intel would love to produce high-end chips for people willing to pay, and low end chips for others. But, the cost of designing and building two separate but similar products would probably be much higher than simply crippling high-end chips. The alternative is that they only produce high-end (or low-end) chips and normal prices, driving low-end (high-end) customers to competitors, or they lower their high-end price and try to make up the difference in volume.
It does seem a little dirty to sell something to somebody, but restrict how they can use it. But, Intel isn't just selling a chunk of silicon. They are selling the work that went into shaping that silicon just so. They could have designed it much more cheaply if it didn't need to do so much. So, by buying the low-end chip, you aren't paying them for the extra effort they put in for their high-end customers. If you want the extra benefit, then you must pay for the extra work.
Most of the cost of the chip is in the R&D just like in software so the cheap chips cost about the same as the expensive ones on manufacture. For years, people have been overclocking cheap chips to make them run like the top end ones which shows there is little difference between them. Therefore price differentiation comes into to play so they can maximise their profit. It's similar to what Microsoft do with the different editions of Windows.
The _business model_ makes sense, because the sale of these unlocks are practically all profit, and thus they can sell at multiple price points. It's just not right in a moral sense to prey on uneducated consumers like this.
Intel develops a CPU and looks at the market and sees that their chips is competitive at $150 price point. So they go and sell it at that price. But the production costs of a CPU is probably closer to $10. And because there is a market of people who do not want to pay $150 for a CPU, Intel cripples some features of the CPU and sells it for $100. This way those who are willing to pay more will pay more, and those who are not pay less.
[+] [-] jdietrich|15 years ago|reply
CPUs are produced to a single design within a processor series. The ones with no faults are clocked the fastest and have all their features enabled. Parts with lots of flaws are sold off as crippled budget processors. AMD's triple-core processors seem a bit strange until you realise that they're a quad-core part with one faulty core.
Overclockers have known about this for years, identifying countless 'good batches' of processors and GPUs that were perfectly capable of being clocked faster, but were sold as cheap parts to fulfil demand.
If this seems like a con, then the whole IC fabrication industry is a con - artificially crippling ICs has been standard practice for decades.
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
That's what makes it seem arbitrary and annoying. When you buy a low-spec chip, you get it cheap because it could be defective. But when you buy this, it's perfectly functional, just artificially limited. You aren't helping Intel increase their yield and getting some savings for helping them -- you are just being fucked because they feel like fucking you.
I hated Intel for a long time, but then they started making good products and contributing drivers to Linux... but if they keep this sort of thing up, that goodwill is all going to erode and AMD will have to opportunity to get the enthusiast market again. (Their "we'll sue you for using the HDCP crack" is similarly goodwill-eroding, especially because there is nobody they can even sue.)
[+] [-] reitzensteinm|15 years ago|reply
But from a consumer's perspective, this is a big shift. It's taking what was once an open secret in the industry and shoving it right in the faces of consumers. And I wouldn't underestimate the backlash that can come from something like that.
[+] [-] kranner|15 years ago|reply
After going over every inch of the source code and finding nothing wrong, I'd almost given up when I discovered the Sig 11 FAQ (http://www.bitwizard.nl/sig11/) Clocking the CPU down to 90MHz, no more crashes. Turned out my gray market dealer had sold me an overclocked 90.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|15 years ago|reply
Then again, here's a thought: This test marketing is being done with ancient-architecture Pentium chips. Perhaps this is a consequence of fabricating these chips with less-dense architectures on equipment built for the tolerances required by the latest generation. I don't know enough about the process to say for sure, but I could imagine this resulting in a significant improvement in yields compared to the Pentium's heyday (or to Core i7 chips today).
[+] [-] wtallis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rms|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkoberger|15 years ago|reply
Your basic subscription to Basecamp, your Photoshop trial, your Windows 7 Home Edition, the Keynote trial that comes with your Mac, your iPhone... they're all capable of doing a lot more (for no extra cost to the company behind it), and you can upgrade for a cost. Another good example that the article mentions is upgrades in video games. This is a pretty common practice for software, so why not hardware?
[+] [-] andreyf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chopsueyar|15 years ago|reply
Unless processors are coming with EULAs now?
This could set a dangerous precedent for automobiles or any other physical good.
EDIT: I'm speaking of consumer, not business purchases.
[+] [-] superuser2|15 years ago|reply
Software is different.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gaius|15 years ago|reply
First time I've seen this on consumer kit tho'.
[+] [-] _delirium|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dedward|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmjordan|15 years ago|reply
Upgrading the CPU is quite costly - you have to take out the old CPU and replace it altogether with a new one. With HDDs you can put the old one in an external enclosure and get some use from it (if the reason you're replacing it isn't failure), and with RAM you might have slots free, so you can keep using the old stuff in addition to the new.
Replaced CPUs tend to be pretty useless. The socket type changes all the time, so you have to eBay it off. Laptops are worse, the CPUs are often soldered on or you can't find replacements.
The only real problem I foresee is that the upgrades are likely going to be of limited use. Hyperthreading gives you a modest boost, anything more than that (clock speed, disabled cores, cache) will drive up power consumption and therefore thermal dissipation. Computers upgradeable in this way will have to contain cooling systems that can cope with the extra heat, even if 90% of people will never upgrade. Might still be feasible for the very low end (Atoms - especially as they're so slow even "normal" people might upgrade) or as CPUs become increasingly modular (either double your CPU or GPU cores in the same package, but not both).
[+] [-] anigbrowl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanos|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dchest|15 years ago|reply
Deleting a certain gene in mice can make them smarter by unlocking a mysterious region of the brain considered to be relatively inflexible, scientists at Emory University School of Medicine have found.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20100918/2064/gene-limits-l...
[+] [-] dchest|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcm|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nivertech|15 years ago|reply
* Nvidia intentionally capping floating point precision on 1/8th on their GTX 480 cards, since they cost a fraction of their Tesla cards. Both based on latest Fermi architecture.
* In automotive industry: two otherwise identical cars, but with different versions of engine microcontroller driver, can have many thousands of dollars difference in price.
[+] [-] shirtless_coder|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seltzered|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|15 years ago|reply
Of course DEC field engineers did not feel like waiting for the diagnostics to complete so they usually temporarily upgraded the machine to full spec to run their tools, then revert the changes before they left.
This was a funny little dance because some of their customers had clued in to the trick and would do the same thing after the engineers have left, upgrading the machine, only to downgrade it just before a field engineer would arrive.
On the plus side, if this is a software thing I fully expect it to be hacked.
[+] [-] heimidal|15 years ago|reply
Excluding the friends I have in the tech industry, not a single one of my friends or family would be able to tell you the different between the CPU and software on their computer.
Besides, which is a better value proposition to the consumer (even if it is not a better value in reality)? Paying $50 for an online CPU upgrade that makes their processor appear 10% faster, or dropping $500+ on a brand new computer to get 40% faster?
[+] [-] bobds|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrownaw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rdl|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kule|15 years ago|reply
Intel gets the opportunity to make a little more money and the customer has a little future proofing - like I said seems like a great idea to me....
[+] [-] strebler|15 years ago|reply
In any case, the processors were reportedly quite bad and the whole thing was eventually dropped.
[+] [-] caf|15 years ago|reply
It's a reasonably performing MIPS clone, and the project is still active.
[+] [-] tzury|15 years ago|reply
With every paid service, one can get a list of features for a fixed price, and then pay more to "unlock" features that that very software can already do.
I wonder why is it easier for people to pay extra for extra in software but not in hardware.
Does anyone have an idea?
[+] [-] adbge|15 years ago|reply
Edit: My point is that Intel is intentionally reducing the value of their product. How can they afford to do that and remain competitive?
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
I could charge people $5 for the download and $25 for the code. Not a great idea, I think, but straightforward.
[+] [-] prodigal_erik|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination http://www.economics-ejournal.org/economics/journalarticles/...
[+] [-] edanm|15 years ago|reply
Amazingly informative, taught me a lot about how pricing works in the real world.
[+] [-] xenophanes|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamtj|15 years ago|reply
It does seem a little dirty to sell something to somebody, but restrict how they can use it. But, Intel isn't just selling a chunk of silicon. They are selling the work that went into shaping that silicon just so. They could have designed it much more cheaply if it didn't need to do so much. So, by buying the low-end chip, you aren't paying them for the extra effort they put in for their high-end customers. If you want the extra benefit, then you must pay for the extra work.
[+] [-] rythie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunkbot|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|15 years ago|reply
Intel develops a CPU and looks at the market and sees that their chips is competitive at $150 price point. So they go and sell it at that price. But the production costs of a CPU is probably closer to $10. And because there is a market of people who do not want to pay $150 for a CPU, Intel cripples some features of the CPU and sells it for $100. This way those who are willing to pay more will pay more, and those who are not pay less.
[+] [-] rbanffy|15 years ago|reply
In their market, it makes sense. You buy a cheap mainframe and, when the time to upgrade comes, the hardware upgrade consists of a phone call.
Now... Would you have to run a Windows program in order to "upgrade" the CPU?
I kind of like the idea of writable logic inside the CPU.