Intel has quietly begun a trial program, Intel Upgrade Service, that charges customers to unlock the full performance of a chip. Certain PCs, such as Gateway's SX2841-09e, are running an artificially limited Pentium G6951 processor and asked to buy a $50 Processor Performance Upgrade Card to get the built-in feature set. Installing a Windows app switches on Hyperthreading, giving the system support for up to four program threads, and reenables another 1MB of Level 3 cache.
