I suppose it actually makes sense in a screwed up way. Rather than selling a laptop with X processor and a laptop with X Y processor. They can instead simply sell the laptop with X and let people unlock to X Y. You were always buying a processor capable of X Y when you bought an X laptop, you just could never enable the Y. Depending on how they charge for this it may lead to cheaper performance laptops as they tend to whack on quite a large manufacturer margin as you go up the range.

Greed rates are growing substiantly lately.

The only real problem I see with this is if Intel charges a fee to unlock on chip functions, it essentially means those functions MUST be enabled once unlocked (no chip binning).

When a chip is sold as a 3 core that *can* be unlocked to enable the 4th core, it's not guaranteed that the 4th core will actually be functional. It's a gamble.

When a chip sold at X frequency is overclocked, there's no guarantee as to what speed a given sample can actually be overclocked to. Everyone who OCs know that each sample is different. It's a bit like a lottery with some winners and some losers.

Regardless, unless there's a significant performance difference in unlocking on chip functions, I don't see the typical consumer paying the "upgrade" fee. $50 will actually provide a pretty significant difference in performance when buying CPUs as most builder know.

But, as it's been mentioned, having this type of pricing does potentially mean that OEM companies can offer lower starting prices for pre-built systems. And that's good of course.

Intel chips actually have very low variability within their range. This is the reason why it is very common that a lesser chip can be overclocked substantially without raising voltage. The various speed bins for these chips are more artificial and an artifact of the lack of competition within the market place.

It's not the same thing as paid content which is already on the disc, since in that case you are paying for the development of the content (putting it on the disc or not doesn't increase the costs).

In this case, the real cost is in manufacturing the hardware, which means part of the chip you buy is wasted even though it's working perfectly well.

It just all seems a bit dodgy and cheap from Intel's part, I don't really like it.

They have always disabled parts of chips when they have worked. The difference here is you can pay to unlock them.

If you pay X for a chip getting all the features as advertised at one point in time then decide to pay Y to have features uprated and this involves unlocking the currently installed chip I do not see any problem. If they market X as Y then make you pay later then I have a problem with.

As Squilliam pointed out this could work very well in the laptop business meaning less model variants and a simple process to unlock power later. The laptop manufacturers win in so much as they do not pay for the additional power the consumer wins as they can unlock the power later without losing the initial investment (this does assume sensible pricing) then I do not see a problem.

Yes but they had to do that in order to meet demand of lower priced chips (otherwise it only happened if the amount of defective chips was low). Now they will do it sistematically and on every chip they make.

In any case, Intel's chips (for the most part) already didn't have the best value for money, and I doubt this will make it much better so for my own purchases I don't really care. People who care about the Intel brand name can continue buying their chips which will keep AMD's prices lower for me :P

=/

Sounds a bit greedy from them. I mean, these guys already charge a thousand bucks for some of their processors.

Yeah because this is more expensive. Both are bad though imo.