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Comment by hgoel | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty crazy that we have this entire segment of features that companies artificially restrict from the average person and overinflate the price of, for no real reason. GPU virtualization is another example of such a feature.

The market segmentation arguments don't really work either, enterprises are paying the big bucks for more than just these standalone features.

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Reminds me of subscription heated seats in bmw cars. The hardware is already there, you paid for it and you can’t use it unless you give the automaker a revenue stream on top of the tens of thousands you already paid for the car.

Same with some old IBM hardware: two CPUs were installed in each box, but if you bought only 1 CPU server other one is disabled via firmware.

Oh, they still do that with their new hardware. The machine comes with x amount of processor cores, but you can't use any of them without paying. How much you pay depends on the "MSUs" you agreed to, MSU being a proprietary measurement system by IBM.

Other software you run is billed relative to your MSU tier. So, if you run z/OS then your cost will be higher if your machine has more MSUs. A weird quirk of this is that there is thing called "IFLs" (Integrated Facility for Linux) which, when I when I first heard of them, I thought was a separate processor designed for for linux. However, it is not. It is actually the same as the regular processors that run z/OS etc, the difference is that is is licensed exclusively for running Linux (or like z/VM to run linux counts too). The reason for this is to enable shops that want to run linux and needed extra horsepower to do so, but didn't want their z/OS bills to go up because they purchased more MSUs. So, despite buying more of the processor capacity within the mainframe, it doesn't count towards the "MSU" number that impacts the cost of various software because you are using with one type of software vs another type of software.

intel/amd does that and nobody calls them out. ibm at least is upfront and less poluting as you can use the same device. Intel, after they burn the fuses, that cpu will always be an i3.

Not the same thing. The equivalent is: buy an i5 but unless you pay a monthly fee, it only runs at an i3 speed.

my point is that you buy an i3, it's an i5 with features artificially turned off because they have to sells i3 to justify the higher model prices.

so I'm saying it's even WORSE than being able to pay to upgrade. as it's more wasteful

Or it is low-grade crystal which cannot run on i5 speeds. Who knows.

Well you didn’t pay for it though did you. The subscription is foul but the manufacturer choosing to streamline manufacturing by only having one variant restricted with software if you don’t pay is not particularly bad or surprising. Plus, easy to hack it back in, so win win

Or I can just not buy a bmw :)

It’s a bit of double dipping then: the streamlined production makes the seat cheaper, and people who subscribe further increase the margin on the heated seat.

I really don’t understand the subscription model applied to a physical piece of equipment that has no digital maintenance overhead.

But the streamlined manufacturing is still more expensive than no heated seats. So someone needs to pay for it. There are two reasonable options 1. charge everyone a bit more by including it as a standard feature 2. charge only some people significantly more so that only the people who find heated seats worth it pay the cost.

It isn't double dipping, in no scenario does it make sense to physically make two models, it is more expensive for no gain. The question is just how you charge people for it.

(Now subscription seems like an awful model, but a paid upgrade for some people makes sense to me)

A one-time unlock fee = sleazy but ok

A subscription fee = Drake no, that’s totally ridiculous and unholy.

I don’t know what the fee is but it’s have to be lower when aggregated over the car’s lifetime than what the one-time unlock would cost to make sense - and I’m fairly sure it’s not lower.

I’m not a free market advocate, but… if you want a heated seat, you pay the extra for producing it specifically for that purpose, no? Otherwise the non-subscribers are ‘subsidising’ the cost of the special seat.

Two things. First - I already paid a hefty sum for a luxury car, why do I have to pay extra for a functionality a fucking $20k kia has standard.

Second, your argument kind of holds if it’s a one-time unlock fee, but falls apart under the subscription model. That’s a total revenue stream cash grab.

I'm ok with a version of this as a concept. The version being when a feature is technically present in every SKU, but requires an extra purchase to unlock. A reply to you specifically mentioned subscriptions, which I very much do not like (except in cases where the feature requires ongoing costs), but there are many cases where having every version contain the feature, but requiring a purchase to unlock it is pro-consumer, and is a win-win-win (or at wist a win-win-draw). It can, under the right circumstances, allow the product to be available for a cheaper cost than it would otherwise be. So people who are willing to pay for it are better off, people who aren't willing to pay for maintain the option to change their mind for a nominal fee, and the company probably makes slightly more profit.

All that being said, in my opinion, it needs to come with several features:

1. no subscriptions for something that is just a one time unlock 2. It needs to be legal and protected for customers to figure out how to unlock it on their own without purchasing the unlock.

I haven't thought enough to have a strong opinion on the exact situation you describe (where it is present and an unlock isn't available at any fee), other than to say I'd still argue strongly that customers figuring out how to unlock it on their own should be legally protected.

I think intel tried to offer GPU virtualisation with their consumer offerings but not sure what happened to that.

Yes, I think Intel did offer that, but I recall hearing their software wasn't very good.

From what I recall they started adding SR-IOV support to Xeon iGPUs. Among the ARC GPUs you still need a PRO model.

Older Intel iGPUs used to support GVT-g, they got rid of that in the newer models.

SR-IOV ("true" GPU partitioning) is targeted at the Arc Pro/DC GPUs only, not the desktop variants.

That leaves Intel in the same boat as the others these days: you can either pass the whole GPU through or buy a non-consumer variant for proper hardware virtualization (or try to hack it).

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