You will own nothing... Only way you could do this is by selling chips with all the features built in then lock some out via software. Then basically you "buy" the features you want through DLC. They trying to become the EA of processors? That shit would get hacked so fast.
The next phase will be paying a monthly fee to keep the features enabled.
Can't see this link? Looks like you're out of fetch cycles. Consider renewing or upgrading your CPU subscription to get the most out of YOUR Intel CPU.
Then you literally will be downloading things like prefetch, caching, bigger cache, and higher GHz.
I'm not sure how to feel about this. On one hand companies like Intel already do this. For example, I'm pretty sure the i9-12700k has the same hardware as i9-12900k, except that four of the efficiency cores are disabled. CPU and video card companies have been doing this for 20 years. On one hand, giving the customer the option to unlock this "dark" silicon seems like a win-win. The customer having an option to upgrade their CPU in place is strictly a positive thing--you don't have to take the option if you don't want to, and you'd be no worse off than before. On the other hand if this catches on we might be entering an era of predatory products...
But they're not always disabled because it's going to a lower sku, sometimes the lower sku only exists because it's binned lower because some of the cores are fucked up during manufacturing.
If you pay to unlock your CPU like this you better be guaranteed to get more working cores and not some half baked barely functional trash.
Interesting point. If they have significant parts of the CPU off for most people, yet have to validate it all, that's got to increase the costs.
I'm looking at it more from the thought process of you paid for the whole damn thing but you only get what we say you get. What happens if your system fails &you need to start over? Do they keep a record of past purchase? What if you switch from windoze to Linux? Sorry bub, you need to buy the penguin package to unlock the Linux features. The whole thing just smells like shit, I don't care what kind of bread they try to serve it to you on.
Never buy an enterprise switch, you would be furious.
Yes it has 64 physical ports but we only licensed 12.
Good points about how in practice it won't work as smoothly as in theory.
As for justifying the idea itself, it comes down to who pays for development of features. By segmenting, they can have the people that need and can justify the cost of those additional features, pay for them. If they enabled them in every chip, people who don't need them would pay more.
In the abstract, isn't software itself a version of this? "You paid for all that nice hardware that can hold any program in memory, but now you've got to pay us for that program to make use of your hardware."
This kind of stuff is really common in Enterprise, companies won't even try to disable it and Intel makes more money.
Consumer is a different story and disablement will probably be a popular hack.
You will own nothing
The scary implication is that we'll be forced to rent everything. But I'm planning to just go without.
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