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

[Ironmask]

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

Unfortunately, Intel is probably well aware about this type of scene (then again, Intel being aware of their own security holes is a bit ironic). This is for chips that are solely for the datacenter market. That is, you're not gonna have hackers bypassing these limitations, these chips are going to be owned ("owned") by corporations who are legally obliged to adhere to Intel's ToS or else they can get sued.

Linux really should have rejected these patches, this isn't even immoral, it's just downright backwards. It reminds me of the old days when IBM used to sell mainframes and would put usage counters on their tape readers so they could bill the corporations/governments using them like how a power company would check your meter to bill you. Except IBM had a legitimate case there given how prohibitively expensive the hardware was and the fact that it would break down so often that it was honestly beneficial that IBM owned it given how often they'd have to maintenance it. But this, this is just pure greed. Intel doesn't have to own anything, it's a chip the size of a postcard. They have nothing to maintenance, it's all solid-state technology.

It's not immediately a bad deal. Again, this is for datacenters. These bills are for giant corporations to absorb. On the surface, that's not an issue at all. Honestly, they deserve to be taken advantage of. The real issue is the matter of Intel seeing success in this venture and then seeking out civilian markets to employ this tactic with. And thats why Linux should have rejected these patches and told Intel to try shilling their DRM somewhere else.

[vladpetric]

Ain't competition great ?

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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

[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

[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.

[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...