Yeah but with that attitude you will let anyone hike their prices up and you’d eat it right up.
It costs intel $40 to make a chip.
They sell it for $637.
That was in 2005 before this topic existed.
The price is not dependent of the cost of the processor, it is that of R&D, the market demand, and that of competitive pricing. If people are willing to spend $930 on an i7 Extreme (A processor that I guarantee doesn’t cost much more than the regular i7 to produce) Intel will gladly sell it to you. Not saying thats right, but how is that ANY different than this new plan.
I’m all for it. Buy it, hack it, enjoy it.
i dont understand this… this is like overclocking?
if this is something else than overclocking the prosessor please someone tellme
new technology that Intel had just rolled out/market testing.
You buy a processor (ideally at a reduced price) but it’s not running at full power. (reduced clock or disabled threads) You can then later purchase an “Upgrade” card that allows you unlock those restrictions.
Reading the posts here, “selling” an overclock actually does make sense. You can already do it, with varied success and void of warranty.
If they offer an alternative with backed support and extended guarantee, it may actually be worth a little. All depends on the actual pricing and benefit.
Just thought I’d not the fact that nvidia have already done this, in a sense, as their ION LE is the same as their full ION, and can be hacked to use ION drivers, which produces the exact same specs.
True, but you shouldn’t have to go to the illegal way to get the most out of the hardware you bought. And I probably would, simply because I don’t really care if its legal or not and because I couldn’t stand using hardware that I KNOW is underclocked if there’s an easy way to fix that…
And for all you know, it won’t be cracked, like Steam (there’s no keygen out for it, and no real way to play on VAC Secured servers unless you own the game).
EDIT: Oops, realized I’m a page late, sorry
Yeah, so if the average forum user can jump to that conclusion then why the hell would Intel go through with it? More power to the pirates but I mean come on, they had to have expected that would happen.
))I wish the CPU race was slower, I built my current PC last year for almost 100$ and nowdays I have to put the latest games on high instead of very high… This sucks, I already had to upgrade the CPU once because the 1.8ghz E2160 was only able to overclock to 2.8, so I traded it for an E4500 that runs smoothly at 2.98 and has an extra MB of L2 over the E2160.
Now I need to buy a core i5, new Ram, new Mobo, new PSU, GPU, the only thing remaining unchanged will be my case (since the pentium III days it’s the same case)
That is not the point. They are arbitrarily disabling fully functioning parts of hardware and asking people to pay extra to enable it.
That response was not a direct one about the topic at hand (please go back and read/re-read the posts preceding it). It was about the fact that Intel could gouge set the price of chips using this scheme because there would be no distinct intrinsic value of the chip. That was my rebuttal to that claim. Intel would not not set the price based on a processors cost but rather on a two things. The cost of R&D and the more abstract fact of the market value per performance as they are already doing today, and have been doing for many years.
Also @ russilker and Fungus
there was a reason that was my third and weakest point.
i know how you feel. i’m just glad i know how to build a pc and can replace certain parts as they become outdated instead of having to buy an entirely new one every few years.
also i’ve had the same case since 2005
This.
And this.
/thread
But AMD does have a similar “scheme” if I understand it correctly-- their 3 core processors are actually 4 cores with 1 core disabled.
You don’t pay to unlock them, though. You do that free. (Unless you have an ASUS “core unlocker” mobo, but why would you buy a motherboard just to do that for you?)
Is unlocking the fourth core considered legal and something anybody can do?
I’m just wondering because if its not then it wouldn’t be much different from people hacking into and overclocking these kinds of intel processors in the future
Maybe they wont be hackable.
I’ve had my PC for almost three or four years (can’t remember which :x), and it doesn’t feel outdated at all. I don’t really play the very newest games though. Except Starcraft 2 in the near future.