"Intel Software Defined Silicon" Coming To Linux For Activating Extra Licensed Hardware Features

[Zgembo]

Wanna download some extra corez?

[TemplarGR]

Yikes!!!

That's pretty rotten.

But Intel has been insatiably rotten and unfathomably greedy and immoral since its inception.

So if people still buy Intel instead of AMD, after all their decades of sleaze, they're going to knowingly get what they deserve.

I mean really, imagine where we'd be if AMD hadn't come along to save us from Intel.

We'd be paying $2,000 for a dual core 2 GHz single threaded CPU.

This is just monopoly/duopoly tactics. AMD can be equally greedy when they think they can get away with it.

[birdie]

This is just monopoly/duopoly tactics. AMD can be equally greedy when they think they can get away with it.

AMD is a saint despite setting exorbitant prices for Ryzen 5000 CPUs and RDNA 2.0 GPUs.

A 128 bit bus, very small die RX 6600 XT for 600 euros? Any time of the week.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Wanna download some extra corez?

Brings a whole new interpretation of the jokes around "you wouldn't download a car..." that were doing the rounds because of the abominably preachy (unskipable!) anti-piracy junk at the start of every DVD and Blu-ray a few years ago...

If they do this, I give it about a week before some enterprising individual shows how to break it and the lawsuits start flying indiscriminately.

[cynic]

I'll try to avoid it like plague!

Instead, I'd like to pay an extra money for a CPU that:

* has not major security vulnerabily
* has not any remote control system (Intel ME)
* has not any "extra licensed hardware feature"
* gives to the user the complete control of the CPU and what it does

I can't believe there is no market for such features.

[lowflyer]

It's not always the CEO that makes the big mistakes. If the lower-tier managers are still the same they will produce the same mistakes. - Or - If the lower management is educated in the same institutes they will fall for the same fallacies.

As a diehard AMD user, it is quite entertaining to watch how Intel plays into the hands of AMD, Nvidia etc. Remember "this is how you share games on the ps4" after which microsoft gaming became more micro?

[partcyborg]

That's a bit more understandable. When you're buying a large mainframe/server, you think of it less as your property and more as a utility, like water. And just like the city owns and repairs your pipes, the mainframe corporation own and maintain your mainframe for you. Really not much different from the concept the cloud, just a lot clunkier.

This is audacious because your home computer is not a business utility, it literally is your property and you own it when you purchase it and expect to do whatever you want with it whether it's even a sane choice or not.

Did you even read the post? It clearly states that this is targeted for non-consumer xeon CPUs.

I'm not defending this kind of business practice but there is no reason to get so preemptively bent out of shape

[partcyborg]

Is this the beginning of a hardware warez scene?!

unfortunately, barring a seriously major security gaffe on the part of intel, no. the way this stuff works at a high levwl is that turning a feature on/off will require some kind of signed certificate for your specific hardware id, with that cert chain burned into rom or coupled with an efuse. this is similar (conceptually) to how Qualcomm's secure boot tech works for all snapdragon mobile phone SOCs and barring a few one-off exploits early on, it has remained largely unbroken.

[xhustler]

This and the bullshit Tesla pulls needs to be illegal. This is outright immoral. If I own a product, it should do everything it possibly can out of the box. They have no right to tell me what I can and can't do with my property. This is already spitting in the face of the rising Right To Repair laws.
I hate Intel more and more every day, I'm starting to see them as a bigger threat to society than Google now. At least Google makes helpful products sometimes.

Down the line they will run an Ad program to unlock a certain feature for 1 hour - misery.

[drakonas777]

It's not necessarily an evil. Depends on implementation and segmentation. Actually it can be very good feature for both the costumers and the company, even partly for the environment if done right. Most of you are antagonistic against software defined hardware features by default for some reason, even though it has no difference from the factory locked/fused off features talking pure consequences.

The idea that features can be unlocked for the money somehow triggers the f**k of you. Reality is that it's far better than fused off functionality assuming price/value proposition is unchanged. For example, say you purchase 5600X yeah. Whats's wrong to pay some extra and unlock 8 cores? As I said, assuming unchanged price/value at the very minimum you get effortless upgrade. No need to perform actual manual hardware upgrade, no need to acquire new CPU, no need to sell the old one. Cores are already there right now, and they are most likely functional considering TSMC 7N yields. Another example: say you have 6600K and a lot of modern games stutter as f**k. Say you pay some sane amount of money (20-50 dollars or something since it's old CPU) and unlock 8 threads. Now you can improve your gaming experience significantly, no need to upgrade to new platform and increase e-waste. The same goes for ISA or fixed function features. Reality is that CPUs were segmented this way for the ages and you couldn't do s***t about it. With paid upgrade you at least would have an option.

As I said - it can go both ways. It's totally possible (perhaps event probable) Intel will do some f****ed up move with this so I understand your position somewhat. But I certainly won't subscribe to an "evil by default" position at this moment. I want to see first.

BTW, birdie writes nonsense yet again. AMD can't control global market, so 6600XT costing 600EUR is not AMD fault. AMD could have declared 6600XT MSRP as 200 it would still cost 600 in current market. NVIDIA, on the other hand, did some real harm with those unrealistic bullshit Ampere MSRPs, where Ampere would have cost considerable more even in "normal" conditions, which muddled all MSRP discourse even more.