Intel Confirms "On Demand" Upgrades With Sapphire Rapids (Software Defined Silicon)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Confirms "On Demand" Upgrades With Sapphire Rapids (Software Defined Silicon)

Intel at their Innovation conference confirmed that 4th Gen Xeon Scalable "Sapphire Rapids" processors will feature an optional "on demand" activation model...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-On-Demand-Xeon-SDSi-SPR

[M@GOid]

I so want a hacker to find a way to unlock this shit, teaching Intel a lesson to never pull this crap again...

[coder]

I so want a hacker to find a way to unlock this shit, teaching Intel a lesson to never pull this crap again...

You mean like how the industry learned not to use DRM when DVD encryption got hacked? No, the only thing industry will learn is that they need to try harder, next time.

To recap some previous discussion threads about this, some of the dangers of this approach are:

• Flash has a limited lifetime and maybe there are circumstances where the hardware keys could become corrupted before the end of the CPU's usable life.
• Intel could transition to a "leasing" model, where you have to pay an ongoing subscription fee for your cores/capabilities. This also means they can increase subscription fees as/when they choose, basically turning you into a hostage.
• Hackers could use this capability to cripple a host (i.e. by erasing or scrambling installed keys), if they can find a set of exploits which enable them to tamper with the keys from within a guest VM (or any other way they manage to gain access).
• Even if you buy an Intel SKU that's factory-locked to a certain feature set, they'll quite likely use the same underlying mechanism. That means it could still be vulnerable to points 1 & 3, above.

It was probably inevitable, but that doesn't mean we have to welcome it. Due to the last point, we should prefer to buy CPUs from manufacturers which don't employ such practices at all.

[CochainComplex]

BTW seat heaters of BMW are on demand as well The "next big thing" ...this is how we will end up in a dystopian cyberpunk world lead by corpos

[Quackdoc]

so conflicted about this, On one hand it's pretty scammy, on the otherhand, a lot of stuff that is already shipped is just hard locked instead of soft locked anyways

[ssokolow]

so conflicted about this, On one hand it's pretty scammy, on the otherhand, a lot of stuff that is already shipped is just hard locked instead of soft locked anyways

I'm reminded of Stallman's stance on firmware. If it's upgradable, then it's software and you should demand open-source. If it's locked into a specific version/configuration at the factory, then it's hardware.

[OneTimeShot]

Getting the end user to pay is dumb.... What they should do is charge software developers to access stuff.

Imagine if Nvidia locked half of their GPU cores unless a game's developer pays for an unlock signature for the game. All that money would add up much more!

[PlanetVaster]

Same thing Tesla does with their full-self driving (and IIRC at one time they also did this with a certain pair of models, where they had the same sized physical battery but the lesser model was software locked to be a smaller sized battery). Hopefully this isn't the new trend in hardware pricing, I hate how everything is going to a subscription model, and this is even worse than that.

[smitty3268]

You mean like how the industry learned not to use DRM when DVD encryption got hacked? No, the only thing industry will learn is that they need to try harder, next time.

Most servers are bought by companies that wouldn't apply any cracks even if they had one, anyway. The same way they don't pirate software even though they could if they wanted to. I don't think it would hurt Intel nearly as much as the OP thinks.

[vladpetric]

Ain't competition great ?