Intel have started selling processor upgrades in America.

Purchasers of low and mid-range computers are now, in some stores, getting crippled, higher spec processors than they have actually paid for, but extra cache, cores or hyper-threading have been disabled, so that the computer is sold at a lower specification. The purchaser can then buy an Intel "gift" card for $50 or so, which will release the extra power of the processor in the machine they have purchased.

It sounds like not so many processors are failing the quality checks these days (where they were bumped down the product range/clock speeds, until they ran stable), so Intel are artificially disabling functionality, in order to sell the "low-end" chips.

Source: Buzz Out Loud and Tech News Today podcasts for Monday and Tuesday this week.

Sun did something like this, you could buy a complete system with bits locked out and you bought a license for each chip when you wanted to use it. It was never very popular in the enterprise, though I expect that was probably because managers would say "I've just bought all of this and you're telling me I have to fork out more money to use it all!?"

ICL did it in the 70s as well. It isn't new, in computing, but it is new(ish) in the consumer sector and the technorati are in uproar in America...

I knew about intel crippling some of their processors for a while. But clockin the cpu mean unlocking some of that performance. Didn't know they were now selling this "feature". I wonder if geeks will find a way around it and enable it without having to pay for it?

AMD do the same thing but they don't charge to unlock cores - you can just flick them on in the BIOS.

But that's not supported by AMD. It's a hack by certain mobo manufacturers