Microsoft deliberately does these limitations in order to force people to pay more for its sofware. It's a shame, really.
Tesla doesn't and they still dot it.
[0]: https://www.linqpad.net/Purchase.aspx (Purchase site has the version comparison)
edit: I’d actually go as far as saying that by your definition almost every good software tool has excessive market power.
That's the "affirming the consequent" fallacy. Specifically, siblings start from the true statement that: people buy software with locks.
They then affirm the consequent, that software with locks is the correct market solution.
(of course they do also bin based on demand/sales, which is scummy.)
Why is this scummy? It's a free market and it's not a life saving drug, they can ask for whatever they want, nobody is forcing you to buy it.
That's like saying "Software engineers are paid according to demand/market which is scummy."
The best business strategy for companies and professionals alike is to find a niche with less competition where you are a leader(cough, monopoly, cough) and charge whatever the market will bear. If Apple/Microsoft/AMD/Intel can get away with that it means the market can bear it. The fact that you don't like it, is another issue.
Of course, in practice, it can be hard to tell whether intentional "crippling" is going on. Yield problems are common and might manifest in the exact same way, after all - for example, chips that don't "make timing" for their design frequency can be sold for lower specs.
No, it's deliberate discounting of economy products!
What's the difference? I don't know either. Price discrimination is a very real thing that exists virtually everywhere. It's why the market will bear Beats headphones in the same shops that sell generics at 20% the price.
At the end of the day, a manufacturer doesn't "owe" you something at cost. The idea of capitalism is that competition in the market will drive prices down instead, and it does. But one side effect is that customers and sub-markets that are able to bear higher markups on their versions of stuff are asked to pay it even when it doesn't make sense at the level of per-part costs.
So it's true, that that Beats headset costs only $4 to make and "should" be available much cheaper than it is. But it isn't, and the reason is simply that people are willing to buy them at $200. If you're not, that seems unfair, I agree. But... what's the alternative?
That's a very nice way and non-scummy way of putting it, yes. If that deep discount compared to the "full-featured" price was made clearer, I assume that many people would not even find it scummy that these discounts are conditioned to being sold a "crippled" version of the product. So, depending on the "framing" you pur on this, you can nicely account for either of these perspectives.
intel/amd could not afford to sell hardware at consumer prices if buyers could turn around and put those consumer parts in servers at scale. in the alternate universe where certain features aren't disabled for consumer parts, your i7 costs as much a a xeon; you don't get xeon features for i7 money.
Sure, they are paying more per person. But in exchange they are getting more room, more attention from attendants, boarding first, etc.
If the plane was completely full of people in coach and had no first class at all, I don't think that means the airlines would lose money.
Also, if there were no people in coach, then the first class tickets would be astronomical.
That is because for the vast majority of transactions, there is a very large gap between the highest price a consumer is willing to pay and the lowest price a producer is willing to accept. The canonical example is for essentials like food: people are willing to pay every single penny they have for food for their family. OTOH, farmers are willing to sell wheat in bulk for under 10 cents a pound.
For obvious reasons farmers cannot set different prices for each pound of wheat to get "all the money". It's seen as deeply unfair when the vast majority of industries are price takers while a select few can charge the maximum a customer can bear. If every industry could effectively price differentiate could we'd be spending all our money on food with no money left to buy CPU's and our whole free market system would collapse.
Of course people need food, but there are many kinds of food and it's competitive between the different foods.
Lifesaving drugs are something where it's often difficult to substitute.
That's pretty much the only argument _for_ doing it; it's the equivalent of defending your argument as free speech - just because you _can_ say it, doesn't mean you should.
It's scummy and inefficient from an obvious human perspective to intentionally cripple a superior product in order to target a cheaper market, but that's the natural result of market actors being incentivized to maximize their own return, they don't really have any reason to care about the human side of that argument.
you know, I hadn't actually thought of that. If you did this, presumably it would involve the cost of setting up another manufacturing line, (colossal), and you'd _still_ have binning issues. Presumably the tolerances would be looser however; if you can build within 5% power usage of X, you should be able to _easily_ build within 5% power usage of (x/2).
Interesting thoughts.
Maybe the other 70 have some major issue with the special components, so they are only 99% functional and therefor can't be used in the high end segment, but can be used in the consumer chips.
Not every chip is perfect, which is why there exists different product classes. For some chips, an i5 is just an i7 that didn't fully pass validation.
I would bet that many other bits of software also have this limitation because they too thought that using a 64bit value for a processor mask would be sufficient.
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Furthermore, your Threadripper 3990x should ONLY really be pushing affinities for across a 8c / 16-thread die anyway, at least as far as the Windows scheduler is concerned.
Windows programmers should use multiple thread groups for different 16-thread CCX. Because its extremely costly to move all of your local state from one die's L3 cache into another.
https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15318/amd_rome-678_678x452...
Look at the chip, like physically look at it. AMD has 9x chips here (1x I/O die for memory, and 8x compute chips, each with 8x cores). You really only want to be moving threads within those 8x cores, because moving a thread across chips is less efficient.
So the ideal world, people would understand Windows's scheduler and work around it. Instead of complaining about how it is different from Linux's. Windows's Thread groups being 64-sized is reasonable for the job it wants to do... and there are other parts of the API that allow you to work across Window's 64-sized processor groups. In particular, to increase your affinities across to a 2nd processor group.
It should be fixed by a professional coder who doesn't impose limitations, especially in an OS, based on wanting to fit bit flags into a single variable.
Windows should fix this -- there should be nearly unlimited cores per group. They can still have limitations per Windows version so they can price segment their market.
Googles it...
$84 a year per user. Or $168 for E5 per year.
That just doesn't strike me as Microsoft being bad?