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

[Developer12]

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. :/

I'm still pissed about their lack of ECC, a feature AMD has sprinkled fucking _everywhere_ since the dawn of time.

[Developer12]

RMS was spot on re this stuff.

Really? I don't remember him saying jack shit that was cogent about hardware. The RYF policy disincentivizes more open hardware and had Purism tying themselves in knots it justify the restrictions it forced them to place on the Librem (see: Librem's use of an SoC with a ram-training binary blob).

Even if he did, I suppose a blind man is lucky at least once, especially when the answer is obvious to everyone in the room.

[Developer12]

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.

POWER9 from Raptor Computing Systems?

[oiaohm]

If Intel instead spun this as "Here's a free and open-source tool to check *what* was defective in your low-end chip, and we'll sell you a key to let you unlock whatever was pref'd off purely to match the bin it went into, but, like with overclocking, we make no guarantees about what the inspector tool will tell you about any specific unit", then I'd be less against this.

...of course, then it wouldn't have the marketing angle they want out of it.

The parts that were in fact fine Intel should make guarantees on if you by a key to unlock them. There is also the problem that at times you could wish to prune a processor to get higher clock speeds as well. So these keys if done right could horrible work in reverse allow you to take a fully enabled single like with 64 cores then force disable it back to 8 cores so areas of silicon go power off to allow higher clock speeds with current level of cooling.

It will all come down to how Intel uses this. The means to alter binning on the fly does have performance reasons why this could be a really good thing.

Intel could offer some of these binning adjustment options as free. Like you buy a full functional chip you get the keys to bin it down to lower chips this could be really good for a development CPU.

Part of this intel software defined binning part of it description is the means to change the binning of the CPU more than once per system run.

There are two possible uses to software binning.
1) allowing higher end parts to be sold as lower end parts without permanently turning them into lower end parts.
2) allowing higher end chips to alter their binning to match the workload. Different binning results in different clock speeds that the CPU can do with its cooling solution and different power usage.

Until Intel releases silicon using this tech we will not 100 percent know how they are using and if they will price it correctly. In the past Intel had priced the software unlock-able chip when unlocked as more cost than buying the high end chip equal.

[birdie]

Uh you can't blame AMD for the current supply shortage, they don't even manufacture their own silicon. AMD is constrained by TSMC and wafer amounts are agreed upon years in advance when they are delivered.

This is ontop of the fact that TSMC is also the top sillicon provider for other companies (Apple, Playstation, Microsoft, Intel with their new discrete GPU) etc etc so even if AMD could get more chips from TSMC, they can't because everyone else is fighting over it.

There has already been a lot of leaks and apart from demand (which AMD cannot do anything about) almost all of the markup over MSRP is actually due to price gouging by distributors.

It's amazing how you chose not to address anything in my comments and talk about something 1000% tangential. I said AMD increased MSRP by 65%, you're talking about TSMC constrains and faeces.

Again, on Phoronix anything Intel and NVIDIA do - they are crap greedy companies. Anything AMD does - they are a saint and it's not their fault ever. Ryzen 7 5800X, which is basically an equivalent of 3700X, costs 36% more and released long before the shortages began - it's OK, AMD is now a "market leader". If Intel had attempted to do the same, folks here would have eaten them alive. AMD? All good!!!

I guess if AMD literally fed you faeces, you'd eat them and say how tasty they are.

[oiaohm]

Again, on Phoronix anything Intel and NVIDIA do - they are crap greedy companies. Anything AMD does - they are a saint and it's not their fault ever. Ryzen 7 5800X, which is basically an equivalent of 3700X, costs 36% more and released long before the shortages began - it's OK, AMD is now a "market leader". If Intel had attempted to do the same, folks here would have eaten them alive. AMD? All good!!!

That the first round of damage. November 5, 2020. release date of the Ryzen 7 5800X puts the after the start of the covid-19 effect to supply lines.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/enterprises/article/3086998/how-covid-19-changes-geopolitics-semiconductor-supply-chains

Shortages had started well before you are presuming. Please note when Intel attempt this it was not 30-70% mark-up it was 150% without any supply restriction to explain it.

I would say AMD would have planned for both the Ryzen 7 5800 and the Ryzen 7 3700X to be the same price. 18 months before Ryzen 7 5800 release the projected TSMC production costs would have had those costs about the same. But the reality is by September 2020 when the production for the Ryzen 7 5800X would have paid for the price was not as low any more.

birdie like it or nothing things started going off the rails in silicon production in 2020 quite early. At first TSMC thought minor price increases would bring it under control. Minor price increase failed leading to large volume order discounts being removed as well. So depending when something started production its anywhere between a 15% to a 170% markup in TSMC production cost for orders placed in 2020. Yes 15% increase in TSMC costs is in place by feb 2020. So majority of that 36% cost increase of the AMD CPU you picked out is fab cost increase. Hopefully this problem will go away as TSMC catches up on ability to supply.

Yes it the classical supply vs demand price problem. When demand out strips supply price goes up. When TSMC gets enough fabs on line price should go down.

AMD its been hard but there have been many batches of AMD cpus and gpus released at the MSRP.

Nvidia has attempted to avoid TSMC problem by swapping to samsung.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-facing-price-rise-but-future-gpus-could-be-easier-to-buy

Yep now Nvidia is being forced to uplift their GPU prices because samsung is now screwed because they have more orders than what they can handle as well.

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190704PD205.html

birdie this here gives you a idea how long the supply problem nightmare was coming aware to those making things. Yes June 2019 this is when the first sign of silicon supply problems start turning up. Yes TSMC was starting to lift prices due to too many orders so Nvidia first thought threatening to take their production to Samsung would get TSMC in 2019 to stop the price increase only to have TSMC go good that will help us fix the too much demand problem.

The silicon supply crunch problem is a many year problem. Yes start of 2021 the mess had to really bad but we had been digging way into that mess for about 2 years.

[mdedetrich]

It's amazing how you chose not to address anything in my comments and talk about something 1000% tangential. I said AMD increased MSRP by 65%, you're talking about TSMC constrains and faeces.

Again, on Phoronix anything Intel and NVIDIA do - they are crap greedy companies. Anything AMD does - they are a saint and it's not their fault ever. Ryzen 7 5800X, which is basically an equivalent of 3700X, costs 36% more and released long before the shortages began - it's OK, AMD is now a "market leader". If Intel had attempted to do the same, folks here would have eaten them alive. AMD? All good!!!

I guess if AMD literally fed you faeces, you'd eat them and say how tasty they are.

Your quoting the MSRP out of vacuum, you need to compare it with the performance you are getting. MSRP may be 65% higher but most cards are roughly twice as performant compared to last generation so MSRP has actually gone down. Hardware unboxed did an analysis on precisely this point. We are also ignoring inflation due to Covid here (that is real).

The problem is that AMD (as well as NVidia) haven't released budget GPU line and again this is due to supply. In order to make money on budgets GPU lines you need to sell a lot of them because they have a lower profit margin. The profit margin for a 6900/3090 is something ridiculous like 100%+ however for budget GPU/s (if/when they come out, i.e. 6500/3050) it's closer to 20/30%.

[oiaohm]

The problem is that AMD (as well as NVidia) haven't released budget GPU line and again this is due to supply. In order to make money on budgets GPU lines you need to sell a lot of them because they have a lower profit margin. The profit margin for a 6900/3090 is something ridiculous like 100%+ however for budget GPU/s (if/when they come out, i.e. 6500/3050) it's closer to 20/30%.

Not just that while the fab/foundry price is high it also comes hard to make low end models. Mid range models are having to move up in price from AMD and Nvidia due to foundry cost issues. Low end models in the price point people will pay most likely will be too much.

AMD lowish end is the APUs that really the best AMD can in the current market for silicon.

Lower profit margin is closer to zero to loss leader profit margin for AMD and Nvidia making low end GPU cards at the moment due to what the silicon buy price is. The higher end had more room to absorb a silicon price increase and Nvidia is to the point that on their mid cards they have to lift the price because they have zero margin left due to fab costs.

Hopefully when silicon supply sorts it self out we will get low end cards again.

[birdie]

Your quoting the MSRP out of vacuum, you need to compare it with the performance you are getting. MSRP may be 65% higher but most cards are roughly twice as performant compared to last generation so MSRP has actually gone down. Hardware unboxed did an analysis on precisely this point. We are also ignoring inflation due to Covid here (that is real).

The problem is that AMD (as well as NVidia) haven't released budget GPU line and again this is due to supply. In order to make money on budgets GPU lines you need to sell a lot of them because they have a lower profit margin. The profit margin for a 6900/3090 is something ridiculous like 100%+ however for budget GPU/s (if/when they come out, i.e. 6500/3050) it's closer to 20/30%.

If Intel went by the same metric, you'd start throwing tons of shit at them in an instant.

I was talking about 5800X and RX 6600 XT / RX480, you're now talking about something absolutely different. Top of the line 4-core Core i7 7700K was released for $350. 6-core Core i7 8700K cost ... $360 (basically the same) and in MT workloads it was almost 50% faster. And then 8-core Intel Core i7 10700K cost just $370, again massively faster than 8700K. By your reasoning Intel should have charged a lot more than they did, but they didn't. 5800X is barely 15% faster in MT workloads than 3700X, yet it cost 36% more.

Again, you've just proven that whatever AMD does - it's OK, anything that Intel and NVIDIA do - they are crap companies.

You've posted three comments which are nothing but rending the air. No valid arguments whatsoever. It's appalling to read this wall of text which is devoid of any real arguments.

Please, don't reply to me. Enough.

[drakonas777]

It's funny to see how birdie deliberately skipped garbage value models from Intel, like 9700K and 11900K. As always "Intel/NVIDIA good, AMD/FOSS bad". Such a fanboy...