Intel plan to charge users $50 to software unlock their CPU's.

WHAT. Yes, you read that right - Intel want to charge people for software unlocks - is this the future of CPU's?

Intel's Pentium G9651 LGA1156 dual core CPU hasn't not had much air-time, compared to the G6950. But, the G9651 supports "hardware feature upgrades" which by purchasing them enable certain locked features through software. The $50 upgrade gives the G9651 user support for HyperThreading tech, enabling four threads on the processor and unlocks the disabled 1MB of L3 cache.

Although this is a low end product - it's most likely the little feet of Intel touching the very cold water. Charging people for a service that motherboard manufacturers boast about on boxes is going to cause quite a stir, let alone what people would think of this.

Maybe pre-boxed Dell, HP, etc systems would benefit from this - but would you want your components being locked, to only get them via software redemption?