Intel Prepares Sandy Bridge Upgradeable Processors

At the end of the previous summer, Intel initiated a test program with the Pentium G6951 that was designed to see how would consumers react to an upgradeable CPU and it now seems this pilot was a success, as the company is preparing to launch a second such processor, this time based on the Sandy Bridge architecture.

The Pentium G6951 chip was shipped in a small number of systems, such as the Gateway SX2841, and customers had the option of upgrading the CPU without physically replacing it, by purchasing a special card.

Once the code on that card was validated by Intel's servers, customers were provided with a new processor firmware that reactivated some of the features that were disabled by the manufacturer.

In the case of the Pentium G6951, this process unlocked Hyper-Threading support as well as some of the disabled Level 3 cache memory.

Now, an Intel document that was uncovered by the CPU-World publication, revealed that the Santa Clara chip giant decided to take a similar approach with the Pentium G622 processor.

"External tools that identify the silicon brand string can also see the change: for example, the Intel Pentium G622 Processor Performance Upgrade for the Intel Pentium G622 Processor changes the processor number from G622 (upgrade ready) to G693 (upgraded)."

Right now, we don't know what CPU features in the Pentium G622 can be unlocked via firmware, but this may not be Intel's only upgradeable Sandy Bridge processor to be revealed.

A similar treatment could also be applied to the yet unreleased Core i3-2102, if we were to judge by the naming scheme used for this CPU.

The Pentium G622 isn't listed in Intel's ARK processor database, but is expected to feature the same specifications as the G620 (dual processing cores clocked at 2.6GHz with 3MB of shared L3 cache).