| Soleron said: This is equivalent to binning chips as they do anyway (lowering clocks/cache/features on the lower end). It's neccessary for market segmentation and has always been done. If Intel sold all chips at the highest market segement they could perform at (bearing in mind almost all chips could do 3.5GHz fine), there would be nothing to sell below $100. I see no issue as long as it's clear to the consumer what they're buying and why they didn't have it before. |
True, but it would still be pretty odd if you took that to the extreme and offered a $700 upgrade to activate a $1000 i7 980x when the original purchase was for a $300 i7 930 (with two cores disabled, 4MB of cache disabled and a locked multiplier).
Although that would actually beat having to sell a processor before upgrading it to a better chip.
