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

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  • #11
    And just as I was gravitating back towards Intel, they have to go and do something evil like this.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by whatever View Post
      Unfortunately these hardware DLC features are already well established in the enterprise world. Companies like IBM/Lenovo have been doing it for years; when hardware RAID controllers were still a thing they would charge you to unlock RAID-6 capability, etc.
      It goes back much further than that. It's basically an extension of the old IBM mainframe days when you were effectively renting an IBM mainframe and only the IBM technician was allowed to open it up and flip the configuration switches.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by ssokolow View Post

        It goes back much further than that. It's basically an extension of the old IBM mainframe days when you were effectively renting an IBM mainframe and only the IBM technician was allowed to open it up and flip the configuration switches.
        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.

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        • #14
          Evil. Evil. Evil. I hope no one lets this horse out of the barn.

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          • #15
            I'm not a lawyer, but back in the day I heard that some court decided that it's legal to jailbreak your iPhone. I wonder if the same applies to processors as well?

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            • #16
              Originally posted by Ironmask View Post
              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.
              You could also view this as not paying for things you are not using.

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              • #17
                Originally posted by ferry View Post

                You could also view this as not paying for things you are not using.
                That's a reasonable argument. However, that does not work with this model.

                Say you make a $1000 CPU, and cripple it to be as good as a $500 CPU. Now imagine that only 20% of your customers ever bother to upgrade it, simply leaving the unused parts to rot and never "paying back" for them. You just lost a significant chunk of your revenue essentially just throwing away hardware.
                This is probably why Intel made the pricing model extremely unreasonable in their last attempt, essentially just making both pricing models the same with a few extra dollars extra to upgrade as opposed to buying a more powerful non-crippled chip.
                This model is highly impractical and cannot work unless you can be guaranteed that most of your clients will eventually shell out to upgrade later. This is why Intel isn't using it as some sort of customer convenience mechanism, they're using it for what it is; a scam.

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                • #18
                  Thanks, Tesla.

                  Also, I wonder who at Intel still thinks they're so awesome and in such high demand that they can further cut down their products and win? They finally learned that fusing off functional hyperthreading was a bad idea... did they just transfer those people to a different department?

                  If this Wccftech article and underlying numbers are accurate, AMD is surging like a storm tide. Along with AMD's other advantages, it's an exceptionally poor time for Intel to try strong-arming and nickle-and-dimeing large customers. AMD sales staff are going to salivate if they see and comprehend this move. I just hope AMD management don't do the same. :/

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                  • #19
                    Essentially this means that every product that is not fully activated is, in part, ewaste the moment it leaves the factory... That's pretty lame.

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                    • #20
                      Is this the beginning of a hardware warez scene?!

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