Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can already do (2010)

Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by gcp on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @11:50AM (#5820155)

The problem with Intel's tiers is that you can't even buy the top of the line device: the concept doesn't exist due to the artificial market segmentation.

For Haswell, you can buy the 3.4Ghz one with TSX (4770), or the 3.5Ghz one without TSX (4770K).

You cannot have the faster speed and TSX. Why? No reason. Well, someone at Intel figured that people that want to have fast multithreaded software must be business users that don't care about clockspeed. Or something. Don't ask me, I think it's the most bonehead retarded thing ever.

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by adlpz on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @11:59AM (#5820223)

Maybe it's just that in that case the silicon won't support it, we don't really know how the architecture is. It's also possible that it heats too much with both things. Who knows.

Indeed it would be stupid not to offer something, just because. Charge $2000 for it and someone will buy it.

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by nitrogen on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @03:21PM (#5821556)

Maybe it's just that in that case the silicon won't support it, we don't really know how the architecture is.

Indeed it is conceivable that transactional extensions wouldn't work when the clock multiplier is unlocked, but I can't yet imagine why.

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by marshray on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @12:47PM (#5820552)

> Why?

My guess is that TSX being a new feature designed for multicore scalability, they're going to pay very close attention to bug reports and crashes on these new systems. They really don't want a bunch of overclockers out there generating mysterious crashdumps. For example, https://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/04/12/4075...

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by zwegner on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @12:39PM (#5820487)

(hey gcp!)

Thanks for pointing that out, that sucks. I'm glad I'm not much of an overclocker. Also a shame that they don't seem to have plans for any chips with >4 cores, and they're still disabling hyperthreading on a lot of models.

It probably won't stop me from buying a Haswell, I'm drooling for all those new instructions...

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by colanderman on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @12:44PM (#5820520)

Well, you can, it's called the Xeon 1285v3 (3.6 GHz w/ TSX) and it costs $662 (almost twice as much as the 4770K).

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by adlpz on Tuesday June 04, 2013 @12:52PM (#5820586)

That would explain it. Do those Xeons have the same instruction set as the new i7s?

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Re:Intel wants to charge $50 to unlock stuff your CPU can al... by colanderman on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:50PM (#5840408)

Yep. They're Haswells.

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