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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

Like it or not, that's probably where the industry will be in 5 years. You might not like it, but X-as-a-service make way more money for the company, and shareholders.

It'll probably look like this: buy a 'cheap' Intel CPU for $99 (say, 4P, 12E cores clocked at 2 GHz), with "Turbo" to 4.5 GHz being a $79/year subscription and "Extreme Turbo Max" to 5.1 GHz being an additional $35/year. First year free, of course, to get you hooked on the 'turbo' speeds.

Intel would be able to capture ~97% of those proceeds; instead of having to pay XX% to the distributor and retailer.

Would consumers revolt? Some might, but the masses will click 'Buy Now' with a $99 sticker price versus competitor offerings at $400; give it one financial year and AMD's board will force them to follow suit.

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I would not like to order my dystopian cyberpunk future from IBM's or Oracle's or Microsoft's mail order catalogues, please.

IIUC, you needed to license each individual core of IBM's POWER servers. And then license the exact set of software features you needed enabled.

I don't think I need to talk about Oracle licensing.

I only recently learned (aww, can't re-find the comment) that Microsoft volume licensing in enterprise charges a seat license for Macs not running Windows.

This feels like an even more depressed reinvention of that. Me not want.

Enterprise licensing is a tarpit of unimaginable fuckedness.

The most ridiculous kind of licensing I've ever seen is an application (for data compression) where "how many bytes did it save" has to be accounted because it's one of the main ways the license fees are calculated.

And of course the usual insanity with twenty different portals (one for every other president, and about as old) per vendor, disjoint logins, human-in-the-loop verification and so on.

OOOHHH! kinda curious, if I create a byte stream that's larger when compressed, do they pay me?

*Facepalms in "when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure"*

I believe in the relevant circles this is called "utility based pricing".

Damn, the future of personal computing gets more depressing every day.

The market economy has discovered this path and is allowing it.

- iPhone you can't freely distribute software to (and Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, so we may as well count them in too)

- infrastructure giants that turn open source services into paid platforms and then accrete all developer mindshare

- thin clients replacing thick clients. Workloads will move from desktop computers to the cloud. No need for a beefy computer to run software locally. More moat for the platforms since tools won't develop for a small market of hobbyists.

>Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it,

That's BS. My mom installed f-droid by herself and can install apps from APKs without any help.

It's not like you gotta root your phone, use ADB, or break out the CLI for that. All you have to do is tap Install when prompted, that's it. OMG, so complex, only 0.01% of users can tap Install in F-droid. /s

Purely anecdotal. It sounds like your mom is pretty tech savvy, though.

F-droid is less popular than Unix on the desktop. They don't publish any stats, but as a proxy, their Twitter account only has 10k followers and their forums receive fewer than ten posts a day.

Google trends shows "Ubuntu vs f-droid" dwarfing the latter term to the point there's no signal at all. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I was expecting it to be closer.

Yes, but you were talking about difficulty, not popularity. Those are not even remotely the same things. Just because something is not popular does not automatically make it difficult.

You are forgetting two things:

- Apple. They charge premium for their hardware but don't make you pay to use extra features of the CPU/GPU. And a lot of common folk already love the 8GB M1 Air and buy it in droves. It's going to last them 7 years easily, if not 10.

- Most people hold on to their computers with a death grip until it can't boot anymore. I have a friend who just two months ago finally replaced a laptop with 1.5GB RAM and 180GB HDD. He used it for 13-15 years.

Both of these mean that Intel and AMD can find themselves with 30% of their previous sales or less, if they try to force the CPU-features-as-a-service thing.

They can only stretch the "you're not the target audience of these new machines" trope only to a certain extent.

Common consumers getting indifferent and holding on to their existing tech is a real market force.

Having to "hold on until the market adapts" might become too big a pill to swallow for Intel / AMD shareholders.

that's a very dark future for personal computer. its already suck with Windows to pay for different level of OS features.

if Intel go this route then i'm glad that Apple paved the way to use ARM for personal computer.

i bought a mac mini w/M1 and it was amazing. i can code .Net with jetbrains's rider without a problem, run multiple apps and play Hearthstone, all on 8gb of RAM.

i hope to see RISC-V for personal computer in the near future.

That trick might work for home desktop due to the short sight bug in human consumers (mostly gamers?), but does it make sense for server? It seems like a bunch of potential liabilities for a cloud host or data center operator. This is basically DRM for CPU and as such, its primary function is to stop working when all the business rules don't line up right.

It will be interesting to see how it transfers from the consumer to the B2B arena but it gives them more latitude with price, which can only help them if they use it properly.

It wouldn’t surprise me if it flips the other way in B2B and they sell contracts for X years of Y teraflops instead of individual chips with fragile DRM on extra pieces.

They tried it for home desktop ~10 years ago and had to back down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service

[ Sad mumbling about the ten year gap between United States vs. Microsoft Corp (2001) and the Chromebook (2011) ]

(In all seriousness, I just googled both of them for the first time as I typed the above to check the dates expecting it to be like 15 years or something. I honestly wasn't expecting... a small whiplash moment. Ow.)

It sure makes sense on the server-side. That's been IBM's business model for mainframes for half a century.

That's true, I had to pay IBM in the 90's for a CPU upgrade where they just dial in, change a config, and poof-more CPU. It was completely infuriating and one reason we migrated to HPUX. The hardware support from IBM was amazing though - the techs are very well trained and show up with basically another mainframe in the van and start swapping parts until things work.

It's strange how paying for an upgrade where they swap a part feels much better than a faster upgrade they can do remotely.

Yet with software we don't much blink (though I suppose people DO like to see at least some download after they click Pay).

IBM support was great. OTA CPU upgrade is convenient.

A while back suffered with HPUX hardware software not dialed in. Was painful slow working through issues with HP.

Dude, Sun in their heyday offered a similar service that allowed you to online more CPUs as needed. As I recall HP tried to as well. I mean sling all the hash you want at IBM, but at some point midrange people tried to do the same thing and for the same reasons - making it easy to capture every last bit of revenue and less enticing for you to switch platforms.

Not just mainframes, on POWER servers they offer the same.

> but does it make sense for server?

Typically in Server/Enterprise the licensing is self-report and audit or activation model. I think the activation model would probably apply here quite easily.

> Like it or not, that's probably where the industry will be in 5 years. You might not like it, but X-as-a-service make way more money for the company, and shareholders.

Do you like it?

I kind of hate this modern trend of taking the most dystopian possible kind of future as something completely inevitable and normal.

This will suck until enthusiasts figure out how to jailbreak the processors to unlock maximum speeds.

haah. jokes on you. the next time you unlock your cpu, intel would dmca you and charge your with a felony. or more seriously, "warranty void if unlocked" meaning you would be penalized with not getting any warranty cover if you remove the sticker, kinda like android oems who do not let you unlock the bootloader or let you install custom roms because "security". microsoft pluto(pluton?) seems to be the step in this direction imo

I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that this type of future will lead to literal class warfare. I believe whatever the next punk movement is will be reactionary against this type of lock-in; cultural and economic.

Maybe we should talk about making certain business plans illegal.

Rent seeking basically. By never actually selling something they can demand an ongoing stream of revenue.

In a world without the internet, keeping track of the paper was an insurmountable problem. So it only happened with a limited set of things worth doing it for.

But with digital storage, up scaling etc getting cheaper by the day we can now track everything anyone owns and rent it to them. So that's what everyone wants to do.

Unless your revolution happens or is prevented by making such rent seeking illegal, then in the future the only thing you will own will be what you can make with what little resources you are allowed to get.

You will own nothing and you will be happy.

Much less likely than just selling enterprise features, which is particularly common for networking companies selling stuff like ports "on demand". The trend is towards a lot more accelerators and specialty features (AXV512, AMX, HBM-related), which aren't going to have universal demand, charging for them separately might allow for fewer SKUs (lower unit costs) without charging everyone for features they don't want.

Considering the consumer market at a CPU level makes very little sense, almost everyone just buys a device manufactured by an intermediate company.

That's just leasing, which unlike SaaS, is not a new business model. It's been around for thousands of years, and there are a lot of problems with it. How do you repo from a non-paying account for instance? With a SaaS, their account is automatically turned off. This isn't the case when leasing out an actual physical product.

Intel Management Engine.

Sure you can remotely disable it, but unless you get the chip back, you've lost it, and you'd have been better off selling it anyway.

Depends upon the default rate. It might still make sense even accounting for the losses. Especially if the upfront fees cover the marginal manufacturing costs.

That makes no sense - you would just buy the ultra cheap unlocked model each year. Also how do you justify paying for a boost when the next gen is faster and an incremental price increase.

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