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.
Fun topic.
Binning (selling by different SKUs) for a given IC is very common. Has been standard in the industry for 30+ years.
This is partially because reticle sets (also known as a photomask set) are VERY expensive. So - they can sell the same product at different price points. As noted, this also allows them to sell partially defective products as 'good'.
This is most common on 'complex' (high transistor count) chips. Most common is memory capacity, processor speed, and available core count.
They test (validate) all parts of the chip. As a general rule, only testing part of the chip isn't useful.
Now where it gets interesting:
Typically early in a process cycle (when stepping into a new minimum feature size), yields are poor and so binning is 'legit'. E.g. If they mark it as an X GHz product, then you can probably get away with X*1.2 Gz if you were to unlock it and make sure you have better than mfg recommend cooling (for example). If a chunk of memory is locked out, then it is very likely locked out for a good reason.
BUT ... as a the process cycle is matured, then yields generally go up. And, in some cases that will result in false binning. If customers are still demanding an X Ghz product at a given price point, then they will take better bins and classify them at the lower speed / capacity / etc.
Obviously, these yields are VERY closely guarded secrets and unless you are an industry insider you will not know where a given company is on a given process cycle maturity. But, yeah... If this isn't a mission critical system ... go unlock and see if it crashes.
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."
They are two different things. One is useless without the other. And you don't necessarily have to buy software when a free alternative like Linux exists. I understand that hardware companies need to make money, but what basically amounts to a subscription service to use it is not the way forward.
(post is archived)