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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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