Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

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The devil's in the details but if the price is right then this isn't fundamentally worse than any CPU with factory disabled cores. The difference being that you could now pay to unlock the feature instead of buying a whole new CPU.

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.

Cores that are permanently disabled from the factory help improve yields. Features that can be turned back on later don't, because they still need to pass QA.

They can also improve monetary yields. On mature processes, the yields are probably higher than demand - cores are being disabled because they have more buyers for a 32 core than a 48 core chip.

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.

When Intel starts disabling cores that are fully functional, then the practice shifts over into the bad column of artificial product segmentation. It may be good for Intel, but it's a problem for consumers. Likewise, features that ship to every customer but can only be turned on by eg. Amazon are worrying for obvious reasons.

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.

> The only reason why we tolerate such clear signs of market failure is because in the larger picture, Intel et al

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.

You seem to be ignoring that the hypothetical alternative would be a market with prices with downward flexibility, such that rather than gambling on unsupported hacks, you could instead get more cores for your money just by waiting for later in the product cycle. A 4-core chip with two fuzed off at $300 and a 4-core chip with two licensed off at $300 are definitely not equivalent options to be comparing, because in a market with no artificial product crippling Intel's price sheet would have to change.

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.

>When Intel starts disabling cores that are fully functional, then the practice shifts over into the bad column of artificial product segmentation.

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.

I think you've lost sight of what supply and demand curves are supposed to represent. They're not supposed to line up or overlap; they're supposed to intersect at a point representing the equilibrium price. And when the supply curve shifts, that equilibrium point also shifts. That's how healthy competitive markets work.

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.

The distinction is purely academic and it explains the "why" but doesn't change the "what". For all intents and purposes the components have some features inaccessible for [reasons]. Similar to how features licensed in software are still usually present in the shipped libraries. What makes the difference are the price and the licensing terms for unlocking that feature.

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.

It makes sense for unlockable cores on server grade hardware, it would allow bootstrapping companies to buy in low and then upgrade on demand, but it's pretty safe to say that this is going to overflow into the user space, where you can buy a 16 core processor for your max budget and then find out there are another 16 cores that software prevented you from accessing and that would require a monthly fee to unlock, which is ridiculous.

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