A sharp-eyed reader noticed an interesting item at Best Buy recently, namely a $50 Processor Performance Upgrade Card from Intel that will allow you to unlock some extra threads and cache on the new Pentium G6951 processor. Chip manufacturers often sell hardware-locked chips as lower-end processors and this $50 code will allow you to enable the full 1MB of L3 cache on the processor along with HyperThreading support, which would be a noticeable improvement.
The rollout isn't a full launch yet and is currently limited to a small pilot program in parts of Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and the US. Such a move might be useful to folks who recently purchased a notebook using that processor but realized that they needed a little more processing grunt. Of course, not everybody would be willing to shell out $50 extra in order to bump the speed of their budget notebook, so it remains to be seen how response to such a program will be.
