Intel Upgrade Service

The Intel Upgrade Service was a relatively short-lived and controversial program of Intel that allowed some low-end processors to have additional features unlocked by paying a fee and obtaining an activation code that was then entered in a software program, which ran on Windows 7.

The program was introduced in September 2010 for the Clarkdale-based Pentium G6951 desktop processor (operating at 2.8 GHz), and immediately met with criticism from the specialist press.

[1][2][3][4][5] For a $50 fee, this processor could have one additional megabyte of cache enabled, as well as hyper-threading, making it almost like the Core i3-530, except for the slightly lower frequency that remained unchanged—the i3-530 operated at 2.93 GHz.

[1] One reviewer noted that at the market price of the time one could actually buy the i3-530 for only $15 more than the baseline Pentium G6951, making the upgrade premium card a very questionable proposition at the official price.

[6] The program was extended in 2011 to the Sandy Bridge series of processors as follows:[7] The Sandy Bridge upgrade program was available in U.S., Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, the Netherlands, Germany, the Philippines, and Indonesia.