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

[yump]

The people who are angry about this are ignorant of economics and of the economics of microchips, especially.

It costs like $100 million to make the first CPU, and like $100 to make the second.

Making 10,000 of CPU A and 10,000 of CPU B costs almost 2x as much as making 20,000 of CPU A. So what you do is that you make the smallest number of designs you can get away with, and then mix, match, and gimp to create products people are willing to pay for at a large variety of price points. If I'm counting correctly, AMD's entire current generation CPU lineup is 4 designs. 5 if you count fake 5000-series mobile parts as current generation, and maybe 6 if non-pro Threadripper has a bespoke I/O die.

And price discrimination is not bad for value-focused buyers (which includes me, with my 8 year old i5 and $150 phone). Instead of paying something like ( $100 million / num_CPUs + $100 ), which would be your share of the production cost if every chip was fully enabled, you can pay something like $100.

Intel has been operating this way for decades, and there's nothing objectionable about it. The only thing they want to do different is let people change their minds without physically replacing the processor.

[Spacefish]

AMD could easily implement such a thing on their PSP today..
You can even "vendor lock" a EPYC CPU today, and it´s commonly done.
There is a way to instruct the PSP to only load any firmware (bios image) if the signature is correct, by burning some efuses in the CPU via special commands.
As a mainboard vendor you can specify which signatures are correct / your bios image can burn those fuses on the first power-on.

Once you put a EPYC CPU into an HPE Board for example, it´s vendor locked to HPE forever and can´t be used on any other board.

The idea behind this feature: Block firmware based malware / persistent malware which modified firmware to stay persistent.

But basically it leads to vendor lock-in today / making the CPU unusable on any other brands board.

Probably at the factory speed grades / core disabling is done via a very similar mechanism, probably backed by EFUSES which are read / checked by the BootROM on the CPU.

[bridgman]

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.

Just curious, what conversion mechanism do you use to get 600 euros from a 379 USD MSRP ?

The best guess i could come up with was the old "times two and add thirty" factor, but I don't know why you would apply it here other than for dramatic effect.

I hope I don't need to explain again that we aren't the ones pocketing the extra money when the supply chain marks up products.

[drakonas777]

How "conveniently" birdie has forgot to mention that 3080Ti with +70% MSRP over 3080 and +15% performance. AMD bad NVIDIA good. Typical birdie. At least AMD's MSRPs are real, not that Ampere MSRP bullshit, e.g. 329 for 3060 which was never would have happened even in non-shortages market.

BTW, 6600XT is still the best price/perf card at the moment. Also, why the f**k are we talking about AMD in this Intel-related thread? Oh, right, birdie has contaminated it with his lies and nonsense.

[oiaohm]

And fairies, right. Only it doesn't explain the exorbitant MSRP AMD has set for the RX 6600 XT ($380), die size 237 mm², and a soon to be released XT-less version. This is basically a 2021 alternative to RX 480, die size 232 mm², which was released for $230. Only 65% more expensive.

Must be scalpers again who made AMD set this MSRP. Right.

RX 480 the 14nm fab price when was a lot cheaper per mm² . 7nm for the RX 6600 XT does have a higher silicon price. TSMC admits to that.

5,700 million transistors for the RX480. 11.06×10^9 transistors for RX6600 Yes that is 11060 million transistors. So almost double the transistor count. At first was to be cheaper for the same design at 7nm vs 14nm this is true. 65% more expensive still means if you made a RX480 at 7nm instead of 14nm it would be cheaper. Double the transistor count of the RX6600XT has not equal double the cost.

7nm per mm² is quite a bit more expensive than 14nm per mm². MSRP uplift by AMD is not AMD being scalpers. Without the silicon supply crunch the price per mm² for 7nm would not have been as bad has been either. Would have been a more reasonable 25% cost uplift.

So what made AMD set their cost higher is cost of production and the fact due to supply issues the jump between nm was not as low cost as AMD was expecting. Yes the pandemic disruption to supply lines of TSMC is part of the reason why the cost uplift was not where it was first projected to be.

https://www.techpowerup.com/276029/t...duct-prices-up
birdie above in 2020 is one of the big o boy that going to ruin my price. AMD use to be able to get volume discounts to get the mm² price down that has gone away. Yes AMD bought their RX480 with volume discount and they bought the RX6600 without volume discount. 65% difference is the effect of a 32% volume discount being removed.

I would say AMD attempted to design the RX6600 to be the same price as the RX480 but due to pandemic and supply crunch altering prices with the big alteration being the removal of volume discount they missed the mark. There is not much AMD can do when FAB increase prices. Yes taking job to another fab does help you when all of them have lifted price due to same issue.

[birdie]

Miners and the pandemic.

And fairies, right. Only it doesn't explain the exorbitant MSRP AMD has set for the RX 6600 XT ($380), die size 237 mm², and a soon to be released XT-less version. This is basically a 2021 alternative to RX 480, die size 232 mm², which was released for $230. Only 65% more expensive.

Must be scalpers again who made AMD set this MSRP. Right.

Again you've just proven that for AMD fans the company is a second coming of Christ no matter what they do or how much they charge. And I've seen more than enough bug reports and issues for their open source drivers, actually a ton more than I've ever had with NVIDIA proprietary "crap".

[tildearrow]

Yeah, scalpers are the sole scapegoats of the chip shortage we've had for the past 1.5 years. You've forgotten to add "miners". And then maybe something else.

And of course neither AMD, nor NVIDIA can create a system where GPUs are sold to gamers directly. Oh, wait, they surely can, they just love money more than their customers only NVIDIA doesn't pretend to be "good" while AMD fans scream the opposite. They've mostly stopped however.

Miners and the pandemic.

[birdie]

There you go.

By the way, not like things on the NVIDIA side are better, so...

Yeah, scalpers are the sole scapegoats of the chip shortage we've had for the past 1.5 years. You've forgotten to add "miners". And then maybe something else.

And of course neither AMD, nor NVIDIA can create a system where GPUs are sold to gamers directly. Oh, wait, they surely can, they just love money more than their customers only NVIDIA doesn't pretend to be "good" while AMD fans scream the opposite. They've mostly stopped however.

[tildearrow]

AMD is a saint despite scalpers 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.

There you go.

By the way, not like things on the NVIDIA side are better, so...

[quaz0r]

i cant believe linus would accept this bullshit into the kernel