This will just open up the door for more consumers learning how to hack hard-ware. Of course once we start doing that they'll call us criminals just for making something we already bought work like it should. *sigh* Just another reason why I can't wait to see the system come crashing down in a flaming ball of economic ruin and disaster. Then maybe a new system can be put in it's place that is Truly inspired by the "Freedom" this country used to be about. We haven't been "Free" in the US since we started paying taxes on land we already "own" and started having to have "permits" and "licenses" for everything. What I do with my land once I buy it is MY business. I also shouldn't have to pay texes on that land more than once, and yet the state can come along and demand that you pay all new taxes every year on land you supposedly "own", and if you don't....right into prison you go. Yeah, that sounds "Free"....right? When are people going to wake up? Beats the f'k out of me...

Dosn't it really come down to price? If they sell you a £15000 car that was worth £90000 with some of the features 'switched off' that you could 'upgrade' at a later date - is this a bad thing?

(Because cars equal computer technology in every anology)

Did you know that all Microsoft OS are "Ultimate", but only the ones that you buy as such have those features unlocked?

And that is already happening.

Not really a bad idea from Intel... both them and customer can have some benefice from it...

Let see a usual situation... a processor with 2 core at 20$, a other with 4 core at 40$, a other with 6 core at 60$ and a other with 8 core 80$...

First, at the fabrication level, it is more expensive for Intel... yes, it is more cheap to build a lot of identical thing that a few of each different thing... method will allow huge mass production with lower price...

At the customer level... you first buy by example the 2 core... with time, software/game ask more power and you buy a new processor with 4 cores... trowing the old 2 core to trash because nobody wish it ( too slow, too old , etc )... later, time for a 6 core... and later again, the 8 core... In total, you will have spend 20+40+60+80= 200$...

Let say that Intel build a single processor with 8 core but only two enabled and sell it at 25$, and ask 25$ for each 2 cores upgrade... a rip-oof, you will say... the basic 2 core version is more expensive... but again, you are wrong... it is a little more high price for compensate the loose of income for intel... mass production compensate for one part but not all... and the customer in all this ? it is simple : 25$ for the first 2 core activated, each upgrade at 25$ : 4x25= 100$ ... yes, with full upgrade, you have spare 50% when related to the first case up...

At a other level, the system can be interesting too... ecology level... need to build only one processor, it mean that 3 processor are not trow in the nature...

A other thing who can be interesting, only pay for what you need... you encode/decode a lot of HD film, simply enable the part of the processor who speed up the process... you make a lot of high quality render, simply enable the part of the processor with a high speed hardware render engine...

In fact, it can be fully beneficial for the customer, the only danger will be for Intel... it will not be long before hacker/pirate create some piece of software who generate a key for unlock the extra feature of the processor... buy the 25$ 2 core version, torrent, generate key, unlock feature and you have the 8 core version for almost nothing... 

I was hoping someone would bring this up.

At the manufacturing level, this isn't new. It's been true for ages that many mid-range or bargain parts are actually higher end parts that have some defect and get "binned" down. The classic example is two video cards based on the same chip: one with 80 stream processors and one with 120 stream processors. Both of them are the SAME chip made at the same factory, and both have 120 stream processors. In the event of a defect that causes one of them to not work, they disable 40 of them and sell it as an 80 part. In other cases they'll clock the part down and sell a slower version, but special programs let you unlock and crank them back up. (One generation in particular had a card that with a free program you could transform into a twice as expensive card. Usually it worked, sometimes the card was one of the defective binned ones and it'd crash.)

The real question here should be the same as it's always been - are the chips priced competitively? If you can get a fast quad core for $90 and someone else can pay $200 to turn it into an 8 core, what's the problem? Both market segments are happy.

About the land tax issue.  If you  want to avoid paying taxes every year on the lad, get an "alleuvial deed." 

I think this comes down to trying to sell your product to a larger number of markets.  Let me try to explain.

Say you have a product, and you know that one group of people would be willing to pay 50 dollars for the product, but you know that another group of people are willing to pay 70 dollars and another group 100 dollars and so on.  Now, you can't just ask those willing to pay 100 dollars to pay that much instead of 50 dollars, so if you put out your product, and charge 100 dollars, you are eliminating the market of those willing to pay 70 dollars and 50 dollars and so on.  And if you sell your product for 50 dollars to get that market, you are missing out on the potential additional profit from those who would have paid 70 and 100 dollars (20 dollars and 50 dollars more per unit in each market).

One partial solution to this problem is to have coupons and sales, where you initially sell the product at the higher end (100 dollars), then at some point, put on a sale or give out coupons to get the other markets involved.

What Intel seems to be doing is less direct, but it aims to accomplish something similar.  You have your product now, and you sell it for 100 dollars to get that market, and then you downgrade that very product (or lock features), reducing the price and features.  Your aim is that the people who would pay 100, still feel good about buying the full product for 100, and that people in the other markets will find that even with the reduced feature set, are still willing to pay the 50 and 70.  Of course, it's not perfect, and there will be those unwilling to buy the reduced feature set at that price, and at the same time there are those in the 100 dollar market segment that would rather pay the reduced price for the reduced feature set.  

What Intel is doing, really doesn't seem that functionally different than just making two types of processors, one lower than the other.  Of course, in this case technically the cheaper processor could do as much as the more expensive processor, and this seems to be what people are having issue with.  

Time for a small thought experiment.  Say in theory that Intel produced two types of processors, a low grade and high grade one, but that they were the same cost to produce (and in this case, they are different, and not just a locked version and unlocked).  Intel could have made all high grade processors for the same cost as say, half low grade, half high grade, but it encounters the same market problem described above.  In order to target as many markets as possible, Intel might purposely create lower grade products, even if they were the same price to manufacture.  In this situation (again one processor is not a locked version of the other), would you be angry at Intel that they made two different grades of processors (isn't that almost what they already do, with the different tiers, albeit they won't be the same price to produce).

Well, what if when you buy a low grade processor in this case, you have the option to upgrade in which case the processor magically gets switched with the higher grade processor?  Well, functionally, this is about what goes on when you unlock the processor.

Just a thought.

It's not the DMCA that makes it legal, it's the DMCA that makes modifying your chip without their permission illegal.  It'd still be legal for Intel to do this without the DMCA in place, but it would also be perfectly legal for you to get a crack and unlock it yourself online (which for any savvy user would be trivial).  It's a nasty little technicality that essentially allows big corporations to opt out of the normal limitations and consumer protections offered by copyright, substituting their own terms (which are blatantly one-sided).

Honestly, this is pretty bad, but it's not the worst of the anti-circumvention offenders.  Not by a longshot. 

This is bad because it stifles progress and is only possible due to the partial monopoly Intel has. We put up with the bad aspects of a market economy like boom/bust cycles, inequality, and constantly struggling to survive in exchange for the benefits it provides. Those benefits basically boil down to us constantly getting better and cheaper stuff as time goes on. What Intel is doing violates the purpose of a free market. They are selling both speed X and speed Y chips that have the same manufacturing cost.

Binning is different and reasonable story. If the yield on your high end product is not 100% then it makes perfect sense to sell the downgraded rejects at a lower price point. The key difference here is that as a company you're still striving for the best high end product and you want your yield on that product to be as high as possible. It's also different than what Intel is discussing as in order for their scheme to work they need 100% of their chips to be able to operate at top speed.

None of this would be remotely possible if there was more competition in the processor market. Intel would use any advantage they have to out perform or undercut their competitors, leading to more progress and lower prices for consumers. Instead they can essentially sandbag progress and charge a premium due to their monopoly (or dominant partner in a duopoly) position.

For the most part that is true, but who wants the bloat?  I would love a stripped down version that does not take up 50 gigs (or more) of space!  But I do understand the reasoning.  HOWEVER (there is always the big but....), Microsoft has released their code in a smaller base when it suits them.  Like when they were doing the NAS game and wanted a dumbed down version of the OS for plug and play NAS.  The Windows code on those took up megabytes, not gigabytes!

And I can understand Intel's reasoning, but I think they are making a mistake.  Not many will unlock it, they already paid the piper for the L3 Cache (it is there, just not used) and they are getting a bad rap (justifiably) for it.  So Intel has already paid the bucks for what?  bad PR.