Intel Corporation, an American based company, is one of the most famous technology companies in the world. Based on the annual revenue of the company, it is considered to be the world’s largest semiconductor chip maker. The achievement of the Intel microprocessors lies in the fact that these processors are found in majority of the personal computers across the world. Apart from these microprocessors, Intel has also been involved into making motherboard chipsets, integrated circuits and network interface controllers, graphic chips, flash memory and a host of many other devices which are related to computing and communication.
However, Intel has recently gained notoriety among the paying public which has a substantial trust in the Intel technology. It is because the latter has involved itself into exploiting the paying habits of the general user. Many people have been offered an upgrade card costing $50 which allows downloading a software that helps to unlock cache and threads on the Pentium G6951 inside the computer. People buying a janky Compaq from Best Buy have been recently offered the deal. So an upgrade is indeed being sold that is in actuality a key to unlock performance which the PC already has. The particular chip has 1MB of cache and is fairly underpowered. Although the process of locking certain portions of a chip is indeed common, this thing usually happens because the area in question is defective on manufacturer. However, the situation is completely different as here people pay extra money to utilize the maximum power of the processor, unhindered by what amounts to DRM.
Despite paying an extra $50 in this scenario, it hardly results in a profound increase in power. In this case, it is minimal with merely a 5% increase in the graphics performance and about 60% increase using the benchmark of the SiSoft Sandra Whetstone. These cases result in consumer abuse. By charging the $50 for the upgrade to a processor, many computer manufacturers will propel the average users to go for further upgrades, thus seizing the opportunity to maximizing their own returns. They can go ahead and charge $20 -$30 more for unlocking some graphics card memory, $1.5 -$2 per minute for a faster hard drive buffer and so on. All of this will be done at the cost of the users. There are so low margins on laptops and PCs that any deal which extracts substantial money from the pocket of the consumers is considered a fair game. All of that apart, there is also no such guarantee that these upgrades are genuine. Many can turn out fake. This could in turn give further opportunity to manufacturers to abuse by introducing additional fees for dubious or non existent value.
The unfair game will proceed until the consumers themselves raise their voices against the indignities of the free market. That is how it should be and until something of this sort happens, companies like Intel will continue to make money.
