14 DAY TRIAL // Though it took quite a few weeks for it to happen, some actual information on a number of upgradeable Intel central processing units has been uncovered, though users will still have to pay a fee for it.
It has been about two months since the news came that Intel was preparing so-called upgradeable CPUs, and users now have something concrete to base their speculations on.
According to CPU World, three chips are known to possess locked features that can be set loose through a software update.
The products are the Pentrium G622 (a desktop chip), the Core i3-2102 SKUs (also for desktops) and the notebook-aimed Core i3-2312M.
They can gain such things as faster clock frequency, better cache and support for Hyper Threading, although the latter benefit only applies to the Core i3-2312M.
The Pentium G622, a dual-core normally clocked at 2.6 GHz, can transform into the 3.2 GHz Pentium G693.
Meanwhile, the Core i3-2102 unlocks into the Core i3-2153, jumping, in terms of clock speed, from 3.1 GHz to 3.6 GHz.
As for the Core i3-2312M, it evolves into i3-2393M, gaining an extra MB of cache memory in the process (from 3 MB to 4 MB), plus 0.3-0.4 GHz (from 2.1 GHz to 2.4-2.5 GHz).
One should keep in mind the fact that these specs were compiled using, as guidelines, the maximum performance boosts cited in published benchmark results.
The assumption was made that the best-performing benchmarks scale well with CPU frequency, so it may very well be that the specs are incorrect, the same way the increased processor frequency may not be a modification to stock numbers but just owed to Turbo Boost.
It will be only when Intel comes out and reveals everything that prospective users can decide whether the nominal fee demanded by the update is worth the benefits.