Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features after license activation
github.com
github.com
For example, look at this nonsense I had to reverse engineer:
https://russell.ballestrini.net/how-to-reset-hp-ilo-lights-o...
If I purchase a movie, I want no DRM just as if I purchased a CPU.
It's so annoying. On a similar note, DHCP implementations are messed up for one reason or another and I now can't watch 4K premium content from most providers except Netflix. They would force me to buy a 4K TV.
Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality? Of course not. The cost is in developing the binary, not in manufacturing it. Same goes for silicon.
Also, "rent seeking" does not mean what most people in this thread seem to think it does. Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort.
It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore.
That said, proprietary DSP aren't unusual. It would still a shame if they find their way into general computing too a larger degree. Can make sense for the line of XEON CPU perhaps. I just wouldn't buy them really.
What is this referring to? What is the problem? And why is this problem arbitrary?
> It also tells me about the focus of Intel and who is in charge of the company. They have many flawed products lately and they seem to not want to compete on a technological level anymore.
Ok, that's one take and you're certainly entitled to it. As someone who personally had to replace some hardware so I could use ecc ram in a zfs nas for my media server, I would have loved to just pay a few bucks to get a microcode update instead of a full hardware upgrade.
Now, you can complain that ecc should be standard, etc but that's a different discussion. But it's classic economic theory: if Intel can charge some people more for ecc, and charge other people less who don't want it, that is an optimal pricing strategy.
And intel already has parallel software running on intel systems, including access to the nic, which is impossible to shut off at the OS layer, so yeah.. they can do that.
(but outrageous, you say! and people will complain. naw. IME has been around forever, no one cares, it has had zero days, you cannot deactivate it, so a little phoning home and license authorization won't matter. This also means your cpu can expire because intel says so.... )
But those are different issues. And I don’t think a slippery slope argument applies as you note Intel has been pushing this stuff for a while.
So from a purely price discrimination perspective, I think this is a good thing, even if Intel are doing a lot of other shady things in parallel.
This kind of setup never benefits users. It only allows corporations producing a product for <100$ to sell variations of it up to thousands of dollars. See also Canon cameras or nvidia graphics cards doing precisely that: locking/reducing features via software cuffs (and of course you can find cracked firmware to go around those, just makes it harder).
Greed is a bad way to organize society: it has failed us as a species and threatens to destroy millions of other species along with it. We need to build a needs-based economy that is not dictated by private corporations.
You’ll be hard pressed to find an economist that agrees with you.
If Canon sold one camera, they would have to find the profit maximizing price and quantity. By definition this means that single product will have too many features and too expensive for some people, and have too few features for other people who would be willing to pay more.
So instead they make multiple products with different functionality so that people can decide.
I’m surprised to have to be defending greater consumer choice in HN?!?
Let's say there are 10,000 people who want to buy cameras, a lot will pay $100 for bare bones, less will pay $200 for a few more features, and a few will pay $1,000 for all the features.
If Canon makes one single camera, and let's say they charge the middle price of $200, then the largest market of low-end consumers are priced out the market, while the handful of high end buyers get a great deal.
You might say "oh well just charge the $100 to everyone!". But Canon might actually make more money by charging more and selling to fewer people. They would be dumb not to do this. Price discrimination let's them target all these different price points.
What are you talking about? There are 3 camera choices instead of 1.
This isn't improving consumer choice, it is how to milk a cow to the largest degree possible. I know you can spin this further that the income would fund new products etc., but at some point it just becomes pure bullshit.
I know you didn't intend this as support to my comment, but it does.
You're only concerned about profits for the shareholders, which i explicitly don't care about (or rather, i care against). I'm interested in the interests of the people, which is structurally at odds with the profits of the 1%.
> By definition this means that single product will have too many features and too expensive for some people
Nope, as someone else pointed out, if there were consumer protection regulations against such practices, you'd just have the best camera for the cheapest price. Because i strongly doubt the manufacturer would sell any model at a loss, which would anyway be illegal in certain jurisdiction (eg. France) as part of anti-monopoly regulations.
> So instead they make multiple products with different functionality so that people can decide.
People empower people. Corporations empower shareholders. Our class interests are not aligned (in fact, they are opposite). It's very rare (if possible at all) to see a private corporation doing something to empower people, except maybe for worker-operated coops (which are not driven by shareholders' profits but by their passion or the interests of their users).
what does that even mean? As bad as a "Greed" based economy might be, it does provide clear incentives for everyone to follow. How would a "needs-based" economy work?
I think people object to this because it's a step towards moving hardware to a licensing/subscription model. Because, why let someone pay for ECC once and not monthly? Unfortunately, once that is normalized, everyone will want to have a piece of the pie.
Talking about ECC specifically: ZFS does not need ECC more than any other filesystem [1]. Secondly, many Ryzen CPUs do have ECC support.
[1] From the horse's mouth (one of the founders of ZFS at Sun): https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...
Thanks for this. Yeah I know ecc is not required any more or less and ultimately I switched to AMD for this very reason (despite my comments in this thread, I am not a fan of Intel and own no Intel hardware - only Apple silicon and AMD).
I did not learn enough economy in school, so is there no limit for this?
Example, I invent a medicine for a rare illness that kills 1000 people/year. It costs me 1$ for treatment but when I want to sell this the money dudes make this calculations:
1 if we sell it with 1$ we earn 1000$/year and we have 0 deaths because all 1000 people afford it
2 if we sell it with 10$ , only 900 people aford it and we earn 9000$ and we kill 100 people with our greed
3 if we sell it with 100$ then only 100 people afford it but we earn 10000$
then the guys make a plot and find that we make more profit when we let most of our possible customer to die , but since we have shareholders and everyone wants money we doom 900 people to death so we can earn 10x more money.
There should be some limits/incentives where such immoral shit won't happen, but so far the only thing I noticed was when asshole was shamed on Twitter for some medicine price increases (I forgot the name).
This idea of a price to be the maximum number that maximizes our profit and not consider any morality is IMO evil. It also has the side effect where you get giants like Google,Facebook,MS, Apple that have too much profit that they use to do evil things, things that free market people consider wrong.
Yes, it's called capitalism and private property, the two most insane human inventions across history.
That's also the system that has produced more wealth and prosperity than any other system in human history. Yes, unchecked capitalism leads to great problems, but there's no such thing as unchecked capitalism anywhere in the Western world today, not even in the US.
But of course most Western countries resolve this kind of conundrum in healthcare with collective bargaining, whether that's at the government level or at the insurance level (which only really works if you ensure absolutely everyone has insurance). If the offer is "we will buy 1000 doses/year for no more than $15 each" the dynamic changes a lot.
Can we observe this anomalies(giants, monopolies,duopolies, cartels , ) appearing then try different strategies to prevent that to happen? Would be cool to maybe do a search algorithm to find the best strategy to distribute money, healthcare, education to as many people as possible and could be also cool to test your own ideas, like maybe I am thinking that a tax/regulation for X would have some good effect, I could put it in the simulation and maybe discover something I did not anticipated.
In that context it's important to note that collective bargaining is very much a feature of a pure capitalistic system. Just as the supply side seeks advantages by forming monopolies or cartels, the demand side seeks advantages by forming unions or purchasing pools. Both sides face similar challenges with this, like holding the group together and prevent betrayal (so you have to set up a Nash equilibrium where any one party leaving loses from doing so). You can certainly end up with universal healthcare in a pure capitalistic system because for the buyer side it decreases risk (because of the insurance characteristics) and lowers costs (due to the collective bargaining).
The dynamic changes a lot because the drug does not exist. It costs $750M to research and develop so nobody bothers unless it's a common enough disease that it can be paid for with what people feel is a "moral price." It seems people only care about marginal cost of production in their moral calculus.
Let's say the drug costs $750M to develop, $1/dose to produce, sales are free and no other fixed costs exist. Let's also pretend that you can sell during the full patent period of 20 years, but expect to be out-competed by generics after that. Also you need one dose per day.
750 million divided by 20 years and 365 days per year is 106000 (rounded up).
The company could sell the medication for
1) $107 per dose, 1000 people can afford it and the company makes $0 profit.
2) $1000 per dose, 900 people can afford it, the company makes $880 profit per dose, for a total of $792,000/day
3) $10000 per dose, 100 people can afford it, the company makes $9882 profit per dose, for a total of $988,200
The research raises the lowest viable cost, and becomes more expensive per dose as you make fewer doses, but with an example as extreme as GPs it doesn't really matter (with the exception that we now have to assume the existence of some kind of insurance with copay, otherwise I don't know how 900 people afford $365k/year in medical costs). And you can still come in with the offer to purchase 1000 doses per day at a price that satisfies both sides.
You just hit upon the problem.
> Some families spend thousands of dollars each year to buy orphan drugs, which are drugs that have received a special designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. About 1 in 8 families [with children taking orphan drugs] paid more than $2,000 a year in 2018 – double the percentage who spent that much in 2013.[0]
Put that up against the US median household income of $67.5k (or $46.6k for black households)[1], and you've got yourself a significant expense. Keep in mind, this is only the median income. 8.7% of households make between $15-25k per year[1] and probably can't afford the copays, much less the insurance.
If it's a scenario where it's "take the drug or a kid dies," more than 1/10th of those kids die, absent any outside financial help. And, that would be quite a lot of financial help, too.
Let's not also forget this kid is probably uninsurable, so, they'll have to have group health insurance for the entirre rest of their lives. Better not get fired from your job when you're past 26, kiddo!
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[0]: https://labblog.uofmhealth.org/lab-notes/big-costs-for-small...
[1]: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
The reasonable way to run health insurance is what most European countries do, with various implementations: you get health insurance when you are born, and you can't get out. That way the insurance can actually work as an insurance (averaging out risk), can't be gamed, everyone is covered, and if your work isn't your insurance you have a freer labor market.
That way, they make even more money, which in the scope of saving 1000 lives per year, I’m totally cool with as it tends to support those drugs getting developed and produced.
Wealthy nations end up subsidizing the cost for poorer nations.
Or "subsidizing" the new yachts for the big bosses. Also many things were created by scientist from non-western countries, so we poor countries also contributed to those yachts with out taxes to pay the education of our people.
Do you think that without the big dirty profits that are split between billionaires the people that work on science would work on something else, like cooking? I mean why would they care that their boss will have a smaller yacht? I am also assuming that not all people that start a business are doing it for a giant dirty pile of money, most will do it for enough money for a decent life, some are doing it because they want to do something positive, and only the evil bastards will do it to make tons of money by exploiting others.
"Earn" in economics means profit. What you mean, the way it might be said by economists, is you receive $1000 in revenue. That is, funds you get from customers paying for your product.
To go a bit further, you would "earn" that amount less the costs of providing the product, including amortized costs for its development.
Look at it from another perspective: Say there's a company making gummy bears, and they sell the red gummy bears for 2x the price of the green gummy bears, although they cost the same in production. Would you claim that this company is acting immorally?
This analysis has a fundamental flaw because medical inventions aren't a one time thing, it's a iterated over multiple times. I'm sure the government expropriating the drug and selling it for $1 would produce the best outcomes for this iteration, but what about future iterations? In other words, what about all the drugs that won't be discovered in the future because there's no expectation of returns?
I understand that say a business man that is not a researcher will want to put his money into researching the thing that gives him the most amount of money back so there is a risk that all billionaires will leave the big pharma and invest into homeopathic products but maybe we could find a solution, date I say, tax the obscene profits and use the money into research of important stuff?
What counts as "obscene profits"? Purely from a % point of view? What if the drug has high R&D costs? What if they drug have a small patient base to amortize fixed costs over? What if the drug was a moonshot project with little chance of succeeding?
>What would happen is maybe some immoral people would change jobs to the ones that maximizes profit/work done.
But don't we want that? If we want rare diseases cured, we shouldn't depend on the efforts of altruistic researchers alone. Promise of high drug prices allows companies to attract more researchers, both altruistic and immoral/indifferent ones.
>tax the obscene profits and use the money into research of important stuff?
I don't get it. So you're okay with obscene profits, as long as they're taxed appropriately?
No, this was a possible solution
>What counts as "obscene profits"? Purely from a % point of view? What if the drug has high R&D costs? What if they drug have a small patient base to amortize fixed costs over? What if the drug was a moonshot project with little chance of succeeding?
I included all of this.
My issue is with this law of economics "prices should be the maximum possible" so if you notice the R&D, risks are not part of the price, is all about maxing it out at any costs (lives, environment,some laws etc). Of course you should make enough profit to recover your R&D, risks and all the other costs the problem is the economic people will tell you don't stop.
Btw there are people that are not obsessed by making more money, especially by harming others, but I seen a lot of "how to get rich fast" books,webinars etc where some dude will teach you how to sucker others and make a lot of profit.
Risks are not part of the price, but the max price you can charge (either by caps imposed by governments, or your customer's purchasing power), market size, risk, and R&D costs factors into an overall equation that determines whether a drug project can be funded or not.
> is all about maxing it out at any costs (lives, environment,some laws etc). Of course you should make enough profit to recover your R&D, risks and all the other costs the problem is the economic people will tell you don't stop.
okay but what what counts as "enough profit to recover your R&D, risks and all the other costs", and who decides? currently it's decided by the market. you guess what the costs are, and decide whether or not to develop the drug accordingly.
The correct price would be IMO the price you would have is there would be competition, so if there would be 10 others creating similar medicine(or CPUs,phones) and what price you would use to be competitive but still profitable ? That would be the correct price.
What happens is if there is not enough competition you max it up 10 times
In theory if the amortized cost of a dose (including R&D salaries, equipment, drug trials, and manufacturing) is truly $1 per dose for such a tiny addressable market, competitors will pop up all over the place and undercut you on price.
From a game theory perspective, a firm choosing option #3 would lose ALL of their market share to another firm choosing option #2, and would have profit of -$1000 because they are unable to sell any of their doses.
FALSE, In scenario 1 there would be a profit but not the maximum possible profit. This means some dudes will have to use fancy cars and not giant yachts.
>In theory if the amortized cost of a dose (including R&D salaries, equipment, drug trials, and manufacturing) is truly $1 per dose for such a tiny addressable market, competitors will pop up all over the place and undercut you on price.
FALSE, competitors will not be allowed to make this for 10 or 20 years.
>From a game theory perspective, a firm choosing option #3 would lose ALL of their market share to another firm choosing option #2, and would have profit of -$1000 because they are unable to sell any of their doses.
FALSE, if there are 2 companies that sell same products there is an equilibrium where you split the market in half and have both more profits then one dominating the market but with small prices. This is the prisoner dilemma, if you cooperate you get better results for both.
> we sell it with 1$ [sic]
Your profit here is zero, in your own hypothetical scenario. Help me understand why the Math is different.
> competitors will not be allowed to make this for 10 or 20 years
You didn't mention your stance on patents and/or intellectual property. If a medicine is patented, would you be in favor of stealing the patented ideas from the inventor in order to lower costs for life-saving medicines through increased competition? This sounds nice, akin to stealing a loaf of bread when you are hungry, but I can't help but think a society that condones stealing inventions from inventors would breed many inventors. Then we are left with the "nobody made the medicine" problem.
EDIT: And by "inventors", realistically I mean "firms willing to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D".
Assuming this could be done securely and somehow even on core count. Cloud vendors no longer needs to provision dozens ( if not hundreds ) of different SKUs, they could simplify their hardware unit to a few with maximum cooling installed. And be able to change and adopt requirement with software. Shortening lead time and capacity planning.
How do you conclude like that from the current discussion? People seem to be arguing that they should be able to own things. Not that the things should be free. Do charge me extra for that extra hardware feature, but don't do so monthly.
ISO standards should be free. Who is going to paid the employees of ISO organisation? 5G Patents are scam, why should they charge for standards usage? Who is paying for the Tech innovation within University Research and Telecom Industry spending billions every year. And the list goes on and on.
There is clearly lots of value these brings to the table. I just dont understand why they should be free. And Why is this Intel Software activated Hardware Rent Seeking? The BOM cost of an Intel 10nm inclusive of testing and packing without their Foundry margin is practically a few dollars per core. One could even argue have all the different SKUS have different set of operational complexities. So why is this wrong?
Seems like a strange place to vent arguments for an unrelated discussion, then.
> And Why is this Intel Software activated Hardware Rent Seeking?
It's not. But if it's charged on a subscription basis, it obviously is.
Sort of. But all the examples I gave were mainstream comments on HN. And in many cases I would argue they are the only allowed views on HN judging from downvotes. ( Along with the rest of the internet )
I don't see how that's related, but sure. But it's not just younger folks, i remember when i was younger reading quite a few sci-fi novels about how tech would enable us to live in a paradise of abundance (asimov, anyone?).
Is there a reason, in a society of abundance such as ours, why food, housing, health, and education is not 100% free? No, the only reason is "fuck you" and young people are right not to find that OK.
We live in a world of practical abundance relative to any other time in human history. The reason everyone doesn’t work a 10 hour week is we want a higher living standards which is an endless cycle. In the 1400’s we didn’t grow enough food for everyone to be fat, let alone the extravagance of modern healthcare etc which is part of the minimum standards everyone wants. Yet compared to the entirety of human history things where generally going well back then.
The total life savings to live like a 1920’s hobo is shockingly low. Save up ~20k and retire to a life as a homeless vagabond simply isn’t appealing. Even extreme FIRE devotees generally aim for not just a shack somewhere but all the amenities of a modern lifestyle.
Of course, the western "green revolution" model of industrialized monoculture is not the way to go as it has shown over the decades that it degrades the soils and renders them sterile and dry (which is starting to be a big big problem here in western Europe). But permaculture techniques can yield the same order of magnitude of foods in a much more eco-friendly/diverse and health-friendly manner (such foods are much richer in vitamins/minerals).
Let's say i would be willing to give 1 month full-time work every year to help feed everyone. Although from my experience working the fields, i believe that's way more than what would be required. But then, if you really insist that you don't want to work the fields, i'm sure there's probably other ways for you to contribute to society. Maybe you're a good cook? Or know some medicine? Build some cool furniture? Play nice music or recount interesting stories?
In the end, nothing is "for free" because we need to spend time on it. But everything is "for free" because time does not cost us a dime and is easily shared with more people. Arguably, we could maintain our modern lifestyle working ~1 day per week [0] by just removing useless work/jobs. If that were the case, wouldn't you be happy to do your part so that everyone can eat?
[0] Many serious scientists predicted it over a century ago. But the increase in productivity per worked hour has not led us to work reduction but to creating "bullshit jobs" that do not produce anything: accounting, marketing, managers... all of these jobs are only required in a capitalist system but produce exactly 0 value for workers and end-users. Of course, "maintaining our modern lifestyle" with less work does nothing to break our dependence on extractivism and oil/gas as energy source, which we should probably do something about very fucking quickly.
Oh no, a big part of the cost is in the manufacturing. A non negligible part is also in logic R&D of course but this is not comparable (at all) with software, where the marginal cost of duplication is near zero. Now your reasoning is still kind of sound despite of this, but historically the customers have not liked that kind of initiatives for processors.
Now I understand that Intel is less good on process nowadays, so it kind of make sense for them to concentrate more on design and on market segmentation at the design level even if that means to make it completely artificial (with SKUs, it could be partly artificial, but you had no warranty to get a chip better than its SKU, with that scheme you are guaranteed to get a chip better than what you can use - if you don't buy all the options, with all the testing guaranteed passed, etc.)
IMO, this is not actually too bad as long as the pricing is not insane, and that depends (partly) on competition. Given some users do not like that approach at all, some competitors could even decide to not do that.
Not in the marginal cost which I was referring to. I absolutely know the fixed cost is a large part of this. But high fixed costs encourage price discrimination because that increases the quantity supplied to the market.
Thinking more about it maybe they simply want to keep roughly the same amount while doing less masks than usual because masks became crazy expensive. Would be interesting to look at some figures.
I mean, cheap is relative...but given the tens of billions needed for a fab, versus the tens of dollars of silicon, power and labor to produce a chip, I would still argue it's cheap.
It definitely should. That's why some of the money collected beyond the "marginal cost" is invested in R&D (capitalism 101). Of course entire industries (health, IT, concrete..) have been used to living off siphoning public money from corrupt officials as grants and partnerships for R&D so they don't have to worry about anything but maximizing profits for their shareholders. But where is that model taking us?
> Should an indie software developer using a freemium model be crucified because the binary they ship already contains the code for full functionality?
Sure. Why is freemium even a thing? Would you imagine a music CD where a paid unique key is required to decrypt the 5 last tracks? Or a restaurant toilet where the toilet is free but you need 2$ more for toilet paper?!
In principle, everything should be free for everyone because everything belongs to everyone. But even if you don't agree with this principle (why?), freemium is a fucked up model that only incentivizes producers fucking over users some way or another.
> Economic rents are a very specific phenomenon and it simply does not mean charging for something that is perceived as being low/no effort.
As an anarchist, i understand "rent" to be artificial value derived from "private property". Private property by definition is just a religious belief (materialized on a piece of paper, and guarded by the holy crusaders of the police), and does not involve efforts.
The efforts to conceive and build the product (whether it's a CPU or a house) were provided beforehand, and by a different group of people than those reaping the benefits of this "rent". That's precisely why "property is theft": it creates debt from the users of a resource, to people who did not work to produce it (if there was any work involved at all, which may not be the case eg. for land ownership).
Awesome. If I DM you my address, will you please ship me the device that you’re posting this from. It actually also belongs to me.
Serious answer: you're confusing private property with possession (usage-based property). Private property is the State-mandated religion (with which we're all brainwashed throughout school and on television) that says a piece of paper dictates who can or can't use a certain resource, and that the people who use it (eg. tenants) can't necessarily decide for it. Anarchism doesn't stand against personal possessions (everyone sleeping in dormitories is a McCarthyist strawman), on the contrary, it stands for the idea that the land belongs to whoever lives/works it. Your house is your house not because a piece of paper says so, but because you reside in it. A peasant's land is their land (whether individually or communally) not because a landlord said so, but because they work and care for it.
Another way to look at it, is that if you are not a direct user of a certain resource, then you have no say in how it should be used. Why do the State and big corporations get to decide on how our neighborhoods should be managed, or to extract certain resources and pollute our water streams? Such decisions should belong to the people directly, not to some remote entity claiming legitimate exercise of power over the people.
Have you heard of... radio? ie. "you can listen to these songs for free, but it has ads and the rotation is random. alternatively you can buy the CD and listen to the same song any time you want without ads".
>In principle, everything should be free for everyone because everything belongs to everyone. But even if you don't agree with this principle (why?),
If everything belongs to everyone, it leads to a tragedy of the commons situation where everyone does the bare minimum, because there's no reward for doing more.
The radio stations i listen to have exactly 0 ads (rely on donations), unless you count as "ads" messages they haven't been paid to spread. Also worth noting, i personally don't consider ads as a freemium model, because the song is the same whether you bought the CD or listen to it on the radio. Whereas in the software world, the program is limited in the free version.
> tragedy of the commons
That is a largely exaggerated capitalist meme. I'm not saying it can't exist, but many areas of life throughout human history have been managed communally without any such tragedy so there's definitely ways around this problem.
> everyone does the bare minimum, because there's no reward for doing more
As someone living in free communes for a long time now, that's definitely not my experience. Yes, there will always be one or two people (and not necessarily always the same) doing little, but in my experience people can't stand doing nothing for so long. We all crave to be part of something and contribute to making life better for everyone... just try to play video-games non-stop and you'll see after a few months you'll want to do something else ;)
Also, in a free society, the reward for doing something, is the achievement of the task itself. In a capitalist society, tasks are rather meaningless: we do something useless, to get paid, to achieve some actual goals of ours. In a free society, we gather and decide on goals that make sense to us and how to reach them: there is less layers of indirection and a much tighter feedback loop which is much more rewarding than working for a boss.
We should not make it easier for the corporations to abuse us.
And yes, if an indie software developer ships all the DLC and just sells license keys, I would crucify them. It's not "downloadable content" if you don't actually have to download it.
As far as I'm concerned, if it ships, it's considered part of the base product. Don't want people hacking around to get the things you ship but don't want them to access? DON'T SHIP WHAT YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO HAVE WITHOUT PAYING THEN.
We were talking about game discs.
>In places where "unlimited" mobile data is not common, this raises costs for people to get the base product
But it decreases the price of enhancing the product.
>and then they still have to pay to unlock data that is now already on their device.
What's wrong with that? There is plenty of software like that already. Take Microsoft Windows. The whole operating system is already there, you just need to enter a license to unlock everything. This applies to a lot of other software that has some sort of trial.
>We should not make it easier for the corporations to abuse us.
I fail to see how this is "abuse"? At worst the game is taking up an extra 20GB or whatever for a map pack that you can't use. Then again, localization files (for the games that don't selectively download those) are on the same order of magnitude, but I doubt that would garner the same amount of outrage.
>As far as I'm concerned, if it ships, it's considered part of the base product. Don't want people hacking around to get the things you ship but don't want them to access? DON'T SHIP WHAT YOU DON'T WANT THEM TO HAVE WITHOUT PAYING THEN.
So the point of contention is that it's a hardware lock vs a software lock? About a decade ago, CPU makers would disable cores at the software level, which means you could potentially unlock cores if they were non-defective (they often were). Later they caught on to this and physically disabled the core by lasering it off. If I have this correctly, you'd be against them in the first case, but are okay with it in the second case?
Localization files are not normally sold as DLC packages, so that's not the same thing at all.
>So the point of contention is that it's a hardware lock vs a software lock? About a decade ago, CPU makers would disable cores at the software level, which means you could potentially unlock cores if they were non-defective (they often were). Later they caught on to this and physically disabled the core by lasering it off. If I have this correctly, you'd be against them in the first case, but are okay with it in the second case?
I don't like either, but if something is physically damaged (which lasering it off effectively does), then it's more reasonable (and it's not like software could reactivate it anyway). But then again, a core that's "lasered off" is not able to be used at all, even if you pay Intel a bit of money, so that's not the same either.
What I'm talking about are features that are perfectly functioning, that are present in in the hardware/software, but that are locked off because the manufacturer wants to nickel and dime you. The business model of "soft-upgrading" CPUs is garbage for this reason.
It'd be like selling a Swiss Army Knife with 75% of the features physically blocked off, but still present. Would you take issue with someone modifying such a knife to access the parts that are already there?
why is it more reasonable? from a purely rational point of view, there really shouldn't be any difference between a physical method of disabling feature, and a software method of disabling it. Instead, I feel like it's more emotional than anything else, similar to "if I (the consumer) can't have it, they (intel) can't have it either!".
>What I'm talking about are features that are perfectly functioning, that are present in in the hardware/software, but that are locked off because the manufacturer wants to nickel and dime you. The business model of "soft-upgrading" CPUs is garbage for this reason.
Isn't lasering off cores the same here? Often times the cores are perfectly working. The only difference is the lack of soft-upgrades, but the "nickel and diming" arguably still occurs at the point of sale.
>It'd be like selling a Swiss Army Knife with 75% of the features physically blocked off, but still present. Would you take issue with someone modifying such a knife to access the parts that are already there?
No, I wouldn't take any issue with them trying to modify it. It's their property and they can do whatever they see fit. That said, I fail too see how that's relevant to the discussion, and it feels more like a strawman. Everyone in the comment thread is talking about whether it's "right" for intel to do it, or whether people are justified in being outraged at intel. At no point were people arguing for/against "tak[ing] issue with someone modifying such [product] to access the [features] that are already there".
Funny, but before the washed out "indie software" term caught on, people called these sorts of shareware programs "crippleware".
Which is basically what Intel is doing here, even if they claim they sell you additional features in reality they ask you to pay them for uncrippling their hardware.
And at least with crippleware you got the program for free.
1. https://fortune.com/longform/media-company-ownership-consoli...
I've seen this meme lately, always in defense of said "rent-seeking" behavior. But Wikipedia says: "economic rent is any payment to an owner or factor of production in excess of the costs needed to bring that factor into production" - in other words, exactly this.
If it's hardware that implements a (non intel) patent and you have to pay to use it, but not everyone would want the feature, seems reasonable to let those who want it pay for it. Like MPEG-2 support on (early?) raspberry pis.
If it's something frivalous, it's frivalous.
AKA sell parts for a lower cost with a low core count, and when people need more performance, let them turn the additional cores on. IBM has had this model on the mainframe for quite some time.
Intel gets the benefits of fewer valuable physical SKUs to manage inventory of at distributors... and of very high margin revenue later.
It used to be you could do some fiddling around and get disabled cores undisabled to see if they were disabled for good reasons or not...
I totally understand the argument that (c) is more objectionable since the chip you buy is prevented from using all the elements it left the factory with. However I think it really shouldn't feel different than (b)? The only difference between getting 8 core part with 8 more cores burned out on its way out the door and an 8 core part with 8 more cores disabled in microcode is that you can double the core count of the latter in place for a price that's presumably proportional to the price difference between the 8c and 16c SKU?
Of course there's a slippery slope to a hardware-as-a-service pay-us-x-per-unit-time-or-we-turn-off-your-CPU, but with competition from AMD on x86 and in-house ARM chips from Apple and hyper-scalers, one would think Intel wouldn't want to make their product even _less_ attractive.
With CPUs, it's less intuitive - The people with DRM-hamstrung CPUs are supposed to be getting a cheaper price subsidized by the people buying the product at full price. The cheaper models otherwise would have to be sold at the full price.
That's not to say that Intel's prices are necessarily fair at any tier...
In the case of surge pricing, there is just not enough goods or services to sell, so you simply dynamically increase the price in response to demand akin to an auction, not selling it more expensively to a subset of customers simply because they can pay and to others for lower prices (which presumes a supply surplus exists). In other words, an "Uber ride at rush hour" is not a substantially similar product to "Uber ride in off-peak time".
For a certain price, you can buy an Intel CPU with certain known features. For a higher price, you get more features.
This is a concept that’s used in many product classes. The fact that it’s also done for HW is just an irrelevant detail.
Or rather Microsoft makes less money producing pretty much the same products and selling close to the lower price, which is more likely, since their margin is high enough to allow it.
Something being known and taught in product classes doesn't make it any more acceptable. Planned obsolescence is taught in economics classes, and it's still awful despite that.
I believe you're wrong. It would absolutely exist, either in cloud form, or as a rented screen-time service before that.
Productivity (and other) software has a real economic value, it's not a movie you can skip and lose nothing.
I don’t see the point in discussing lala land hypotheticals.
Can you quote single mainstream economist claiming that market entry barriers don't exist?
An Intel leveraging their position to under-invest and earn outsize gains from their leadership position in x86 ... would lose business to competitors (like they have been by AMD), innovators (like they are to Nvidia) and substitutes (like they have to Apple Silicon).
That's my point and de-legitimizes the economic model that grants them private control.
Of course there's a slippery slope to a hardware-as-a-service pay-us-x-per-unit-time-or-we-turn-off-your-CPU, but with competition from AMD on x86 and in-house ARM chips from Apple and hyper-scalers, one would think Intel wouldn't want to make their product even _less_ attractive.
...and what makes you think AMD and others are not going to try the same thing?
SaaS offerings doesn't seem to gather the same type of hate though? When was the last time people were outraged that the "basic" tier lacked features in the "premium" tier, even though the code for implementing such feature is literally on the same server and gated behind an if statement?
Overwhelming competitive pressure? AMD and Intel may be a duopoly on x86 parts, but Apple Silicon has proved, and AWS Graviton has a strong argument, that consumer and cloud compute workloads can transition to ARM. Any attempt by Intel to leverage its market position just accelerates that transition to substitutes.
FWIW, I find both b and c objectionable.
I can make 10 widgets for 10 customers to buy, but between those 10 customers, 2 of them want the cheapest version, 6 of them want the medium option, and the last 2 want the most expensive option. The way to maximize profit is to produce that same distribution, divorced from the actual yield of the production process. Pricing a product is a dark art but looking a bit closer at it, there's a huge psychological or human nature element to it.
Competition only works, if people compete on that market point.
This can be a juicy revenue stream. If intel gets little blowback, expect AMD and others to salivate, then jump on board.
Arguments could be made that it's ecologically criminal to destroy useful things for profit.
[1] of course in choosing this example, we admit that _government_ might ethically choose to destroy production to maintain price floors so that domestically-produced products remain available.
There is a very famous economics paper by Deneckere and McAfee that outlines exactly this behaviour from Intel in the 386 (…?) days, and how it may even lead to Pareto improvement - and increased consumer welfare. I can’t find it at the moment on mobile, but it should be relatively easily surfaced.
Edit: found it, “Damaged Goods” - https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/faculty/langinier/teaching2005...
If your manufacturing efficiency has advanced to the point that you no longer have low quality parts coming out of your binning process, then I think customers are right to wonder why that savings and efficiency aren't being passed on or being used to further advance the product line.
In any case, if the purpose of passing the inferior products off under an alternative label is to avoid brand damage, then this seems to be the opposite of that.
If you no longer have N core chips because all of them test good at more cores, but don't want to sell the N+1 core chips at the old N core price, you've raised prices with all that entails.
Solution: make the parts on one line, inspect the greater number of how many they’d need to inspect for Ford and Cessna, stamp all the inspected parts and sell any part to Ford and only stamped parts to Cessna. All three companies can benefit from that arrangement.
I can see how in theory it might make sense for market segregation. Say you're designing a 2-core and a 4-core CPU - the design simplifications and manufacturing efficiencies of just making one chip (and partly disabling some of them) _might_ drive the price down for both market segments compared to manufacturing two designs, even if on the surface the 2-core user seems to be buying more hardware than they are given access to.
With that in mind, SDS doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Buying an n-core chip that can later be upgraded to a 2n-core chip without buying a completely new part seems preferable in some ways to buying an n-core that is actually a 2n-core chip that has had half its cores laser-sliced off (and thus can never reasonably be reactivated) to fit a market need.
[1] https://www.cpu-world.com/info/AMD/Unlocking_cores_and_L3.ht...
Also it could have been disabled because it was faulty when testing so binned differently or just to meet unit numbers for a SKU. Thing is you don't know.
Here intel is selling you a pice of hardware but by telling you can pay later to unlock it. They are telling you it this extra functionality works. The thing is once intel sells a device they no longer own it. So what rubs a lot people wrongly here is that for something you own your now having to ask intel to use some aspect of it. For things you own you should not be asking 3rd parties for permission to use your property.
If you are asking a 3rd party for permission do something/use something “you own”. This implies the seller has managed to retain some aspects of the right of exclusion. The issue here is the sell of tangible property normally involves the transfer of all rights. If the seller wants to retain some rights normally a contract is needed.
Now with this situation intel using a couple things to basically retain this right of exclusion. First cryptography since you don’t have the private keys anything controlled by those keys intel effectively controls. Second is software copyright. A type of intangible property were the right to copy/reproduce is by default legally retained unlike other forms of property. So any software tools to enable this additionally functionality intel can keep a tighter grasp legally on its reproduction.
Anyways the short and sweet if your having to ask the seller for permission after the sell to do something with something you “own” it implies the seller is some how retaining some property rights. This is going to rub people wrongly for tons of reasons.
Of course, there's an argument that this is just to protect the exclusivity of the primary retail channel, and that increased prices in that channel cover any losses from destroying, rather than down-binning unsold merchandise. The same argument might also apply to HEDT processors :)
The most eggregious of these is browser-based apps. You have zero control over upgrades and whether you want features or not. With a desktop app, atleast you can ignore updates.
The switch to SaaS didn’t really end up costing it’s pro users much more since they were spending $600 every 2-3 years on it anyway. But I suspect it did convert at least some of the people who pirated a copy from work into paying customers.
a) abandoning CPU vendors that do this, forever if needs be b) pirating features in my CPU
The code is all there for everyone, compiled and ready in case the customer decides to upgrade their license.
Is what we're doing "rent-seeking" as well?
Of course we could make differentiated builds, just add in a bunch of ifdefs and provide a new executable to the user when they upgrade their license. Would that be any different?
The result would be the same, the user would still pay more to get access to the additional functionality.
So, if you are licensing a CPU feature, you may be paying twice for it. Of course, whether you actually do so, depends on the relative cost of producing that area of the die vs. the development cost of that functionality.
Another issue is that this probably would not happen in a healthy, competitive market. In fact, the opposite would happen, CPU vendors would try to provide more features at a price point in order to compete (which is probably why AMD does support ECC on many Ryzen SKUs, as an underdog AMD still has to compete). However, if you need a x86_64 machine, you only have two options. Or if you are unlucky and required to purchase from a large vendor like Dell, you may only have one option.
While strictly true, the actual die is a relatively tiny cost when producing a CPU. The majority of the cost is the upfront cost of designing the masks. Once you have those, using this or that mask doesn't make a huge difference.
> Suppose that ECC support takes a certain die area, then either everyone is already paying for it while buying the CPU or everyone who licenses the feature is paying for the silicon for everyone who doesn't enable it.
As mentioned the majority of the cost of the ECC support is in the R&D, not the physical manufacturing. As such, moving this to a software level can be a win-win for both parties. By selling ECC support to more customers, they can afford to price the bare CPU cheaper.
That's exactly what happens with our software. There's no way we could sell to single-person companies at the price we do without having features behind "license walls".
> Another issue is that this probably would not happen in a healthy, competitive market. In fact, the opposite would happen [...]
One of the reasons people love cloud computing these days is that the cost scales with activity. Get more customers generating more activity? No problem, just add some extra capacity from your cloud provider. Need some additional functionality to service a new market? No need to pay for years for something you don't use until you need it.
> It is suspected (although nobody confirmed ) that to fully comply with CARBs requirements BMW needed to make sure that the car’s gasoline range is lower than it’s range when it’s powered by electricity alone. To accomplish that they lowered tank’s capacity (from 2.4 US gal to 1.9 US gal). We, software engineers, hate when accountants win.
In software, the trick is it is licensed not sold, so you are not allowed even if you can do something.
But a car is sold. So if you want to cut of a piece of the car, what's going to stop you?
Government regulations. In Germany (and probably also in the rest of the EU, since that stuff has been harmonized over the last decade), the tank volume is recorded in field #12 of the car's registration/title document... which means any form of DIY modification without changing the title will yield you a criminal charge for operating a car that is not roadworthy.
Edit additionally, ordinary police also has these rights, and there are, at least in Germany, focused checkpoint controls that specialize in checking for illegal / untitled modifications ("Schwerpunktkontrolle"). And in case of a severe accident where an auditor combs over your vehicle to determine fault, something like this will pop up and be sanctioned, even if it had no relationship to the accident at all.
In any case I would not go and risk jail time, a massive fine, or in worst case forfeit of the illegally modified vehicle.
> (W) fuel tank(s) capacity (in litres).
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Intel can brick your computer remotely just as easily as Apple can. The only reason they have not done so, is because the US government haven't told them to.
Same applies to Chinese telecom equipment of course, and the Internet itself.
In fact, it's a feature of weapons sold as well. US supplied fighter jets will conveniently not allow firing on sources of secret US codes transmitted.
Most people have no clue that even their SIM card runs its own operating system, that communicates and is powered remotely. Not from great distance but still.
What do you mean with this? Do you have a link explaining in more detail?
In short, computers powered wirelessly over short distances. A larger, fixed device with ample power ("card reader") produces a radio field; The NFC chip is an antenna with a computer that gains enough power from the radio field itself to do computation on the signal and transmit a response. Since the NFC chip is obviously very low power, it has to be close enough to be heard.
But anyone with the right kind of portable card reader can attempt to communicate with your NFC cards in your wallet simply by passing you on the street.
Phones, of course, already communicate over long distances, so NFC would be somewhat pointless on a SIM card specifically :P
I don't think they contain their own NFC hardware, but I've definitely seen a connection there.
From a technical standpoint they can, but it would be illegal. If war with China breaks out it could certaily happen that the US bricks their computers and they brick our communications, and both side work hard to mitigate that by reducing dependence on each other. But at least in peace time we can for all intents and purposes claim to own the CPU, even if we don't have full control.
It's a lease protected by international agreements and peacetime, but a lease nontheless.
Actually I just realized all ownership is backed only by law. Hmm. I guess consumer protection affords me reimbursement if Intel bricks my CPU. If I'm at war with USA, who cares about consumer protection at that point? :D
Source for that please.
> US supplied fighter jets will conveniently not allow firing on sources of secret US codes transmitted.
Source for that too please.
I mean we have everything from biometric handguns to autonomous strike drones, what military industrial complex would sell weapons they can't disable at will?
Today it's the other way around and most organisations don't lease the actual iron, they lease the infrastructure around it - turnkey software solutions, maintenance, scaling, (physical-)security, asset management, etc. - the works.
Sure, you could buy a couple of servers for cheap and even including annual upkeep they'd be cheaper than your AWS, GCP, or Azure package. Problem is that you now need an administrator who doesn't have enough work to be a fulltime employee, likely a developer, who also doesn't have enough work to justify a fulltime position, and worst of all your machines are running idle 90% of the time and still the order system collapses when your annual big sale starts...
In other words, hardware costs are only part of the equation and it can make a lot of sense to outsource this component.
Need more processing power for your quarterly reports and annual stocktacking? No problem, give them a call and they'll unlock additional resources for a time (and a fee, but that goes without saying).
Young Padawan, you've never dealt with IBM and their mainframes...
(Yes, one Atom processor got cracked so far.)
> And God help you if an A-list blogger finds out that your premium printer is identical to the cheap printer, with the speed inhibitor turned off. [1]
I don't think he could have imagined that consumers would be forced to tolerate the subscriptions and rentals we see today.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
I'm pretty sure there were certain desktop chips for which virtualization instructions were an in-chip-purchase, for instance.
Why disable half the cores and leave them unsold, when selling both halves makes you twice as much money?
This allows for upgrades without having to replace the hardware. Consider you buy consumer gear at consumer prices without ECC functionality. Then you decide you'd like to run ZFS or something where ECC is encouraged. Instead of having to replace the processor, you just upgrade the microcode.
I'm altering our deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
He nearly tripled VMware revenue since be became CEO.
Its entirely possible to post a few years of crazy profits while tanking the company.
And I'd reckon at retail that sub-brand and product confusion leads to most customers buying the least costly and lowest spec version and tossing the machine in the bin if it's unsuitable.
Any undifferentiated "intel core i" processor is just the same as any other undifferentiated "intel core i" processor to the layman. Most laptops at retail aren't even labeled with the cpu model number. If the cpu is slow it's just because Intel products are crap.
I remember hearing a few years back about Intel rolling a special weird Xeon SKU with VNNI/bfloat16 tacked onto a different core architecture that got cancelled, specifically because Facebook backed out of the project. However, I think that was intended to be a publicly-available SKU that just didn't make monetary sense to produce in volume.
There's also the occasional off-roadmap SKUs that eventually wind up on eBay or wherever... but my impression was that these were just ways for Intel to obfuscate whatever special volume deals they were giving certain hyperscalars.