> The code outlined a process for enabling new features by verifying cryptographically signed licences
This smells a lot like laying the groundwork for locking processor features behind a license key. Get ready for a monthly CPU license plan...
This smells a lot like laying the groundwork for locking processor features behind a license key. Get ready for a monthly CPU license plan...
On the other hand if I have no guarantee the license is valid forever and I own it, or that I can use it in any conditions not just with internet connectivity, or it's tied to the rest of the machine, or only until I want to sell my hardware, then it does become fundamentally worse.
This might be a new way to enable more flexibility for cloud providers so they can customize each offering without having different sets of hardware, just a license management component. I also see this as something OEMs may be interested in, tiering otherwise identical products could be just a FW switch away, greatly simplifying logistics and manufacturing. OEMs could customize the CPUs they receive while Intel would shrink the number of SKUs. Being Intel though means none of the savings will ever reach the consumer.
If they can sell another 16 cores at no incremental cost post sale, that's attractive. As long as it doesn't prevent that customer from buying a whole new 48 core chip from them, anyway.
The only reason why we tolerate such clear signs of market failure is because in the larger picture, Intel et al. need to keep their margins high and consistent to keep Moore's Law alive(ish). Maintaining such a fast pace of progress is probably better for customers in the long run, even if it means getting ripped off in the short term. But without such a benefit to make the tradeoff worthwhile, customers and economic policymakers would be right to be incensed when Intel uses wasteful tactics like disabling defect-free silicon in order to insulate their price sheet from the true supply and demand dynamics of their market.
Let's not forget our history here. I'm not a big fan of Intel but any techie will remember we successfully "tolerated" such practices decades ago when the Celeron 300A ran at double frequency, the Radeon X800 series got 50-100% more pixel shaders, or the Phenom X3s got 33% more cores for free. If anything customers were rejoicing.
The market was always artificially segmented. The only reason we don't know today whether disabled blocks are good or not is that manufacturers have gotten better at keeping them disabled.
You'd be hard pressed to tell me the actual real life difference for you between a $300 4-core CPU with 2 cores fused off, and a $300 4-core CPU with 2 cores licensed off.
> Intel uses wasteful tactics
Intel fashion dictates the user will see little benefit but differentiating SKUs in software is certainly less wasteful from the manufacturer's and OEM's perspective. The logistics alone might be worth it.
Software manufacturers ship full installers with features disabled in licensing. Streaming services store all content but serve you a lower quality one based on your particular "license". Car manufacturers sell essentially the same engine with different power outputs.
As I said, there are no bad products, just bad prices.
The fact that artificially crippling chips is not new does not mean it's a good thing. Having accepted a tradeoff doesn't erase its downsides.
Why?
If their yield improves, should lower core count chips become scarce and then approach the cost per core of higher end chips? That's not exactly in the interest of a consumer anyway.
Also, they absolutely already do that today - all chip manufacturers make viable cores inaccessible so they can have the right part mix that is selling the way they want.
If your demand curve perfectly matches your supply/yield curve, great - but that's rare over time.
As yields improve, consumers should expect to see changes other than dwindling stocks of low core count parts. High core count parts should be getting cheaper, or low core count parts start showing up with higher speed bins or lower voltage bins.
Chips have been known to have perfectly functioning blocks disabled, or frequency limited not for improved yields but simply because the demand for a lower end SKUs was so high. Unlocking them was a matter of penciling some fuses, flashing a firmware, or simply changing a setting in the BIOS.
If anything this kind of licensing opens the door to "hardware piracy" where under the correct conditions you may be able to hack older, or unsupported hardware to gain the full functionality.
MPEG 2 has been patent free since 2018 in US and 2020 worldwide. Along with AAC-LC. They are charging for license key for the usage of that specific decoder block only. i.e The IP of the actual HW decoder, not the codec itself.
MPEG 2 and VC1 is so low in complexity you are software decode it with minimal CPU resource on RPi 4.
The patents were still active, and the technology was still useful, when the Pi Foundation started selling the license keys in 2012. Nowadays... yeah, they're irrelevant.
You have to buy some stupid dongle to enable "Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU" feature, and it's like $100 or something silly.