Those $50 Intel "Upgrade" Cards from Best Buy unlock latent processing power your computer already has kicking around inside its silicon guts. How nice of them!
As detailed by the folks at Hardware.info, the cards grant you access to software that upgrades the Pentium G6951 processor. It does this by enabling the 1MB of L3 cache and HyperThread support that already exists on the chip. As others have already noted, this isn't an entirely new practice, but that doesn't make it anymore easy to swallow. [Hardware.info via Engadget]
DISCUSSION
I'm sitting in a hotel room. There's a little minibar here with all sorts of goodies in it. It's IN MY ROOM.
If I unlock it, I'm liable for anything I use, including half a dozen oreos for $3.
My hotel room contains this functionality, but it costs extra to use it.
This is not the real tragedy. The real tragedy is that vending-pack oreos are smaller in diameter than real oreos.