- Modern lithography just isn't that precise to my understanding. The whole point of binning chips is that you aim for an entire wafer of Core i9s, but you accept that some flaws will occur and will require disabling features of the chip. Are the disabled features "non-essential"? Certainly seems like they are if they can be disabled.
- From a marketing perspective, you'd need to help customers decipher dozens of different models of the same chip. For n features, you'd need (2^n)-1 chips, right? So Model A would support everything; Model B would support everything except virtualization; Model C eould support everything except HDCP; and so on.
- And as a customer, does that mean I need to spend $500 and replace my CPU everytime I realize I need a new feature? How would that work for laptops, where chips are frequently soldered to the motherboard?
I'm sympathetic to the idea of requiring transparency in general, but unfortunately hardware is a helluva lot trickier than software.