Hold onto your hyperthreaded horses, because this is probable to whip up an angry host — Intel’s asking customers to compensate additional if they want the full energy of their store-bought silicon. An eagle-eyed Engadget reader was surfing a Best Buy shelves when he beheld this $50 card — and certain sufficient, Intel websites endorse — which lets you download software to unlock additional threads as well as cache upon the brand-new Pentium G6951 processor. Hardware.info got their hands upon an early representation of the chip as well as discovered it’s essentially the full 1MB of L3 cache that’s enabled plus HyperThreading await, which translates to a medium though noticeable upgrade. This isn’t just an rare move, as chip companies routinely sell hardware-locked chips all a time in a routine known as binning, but there they have the simpler excuse — binned chips have been typically sold with cores or cache sealed since which part of their silicon incited out poor after copy. This brand-new thought is more akin to video games that let you “download” additional weapons as well as features, when those facilities were on the front all along. Still, it’s an appealing business model, and before you unleash your rage in comments, you should know which Intel’s just contrast it out upon this low-end processor in a few select markets for right away.

[Thanks, Brian]

Via Engadget