"What if you were to give us even more money?" - Intel announces Intel On Demand

[Thaldor]

On 11/23/2022 at 8:38 AM, LAwLz said:

I also don't really see how this is any different from them locking features in hardware rather than software. At the end of the day, they are artificially segmenting their product stack for profits. It's just that this process is reversible compared to the hardware method which everyone, including AMD and Nvidia have and are doing instead.

The big thing are the reasons.

 

HW disabling can be reasoned by the chips not meeting the required specs whether it is unstable cores, straight out not working cores, ASICs and whatever not working as planned and so being cut off or just disabled. As with the Phenom II's while more around 75% of X2's could be unlocked to be X4's, most of them also needed extra voltage to reach the same performance as higher binned X4's telling that the disabled cores weren't locked without a reason. You can say same about any CPU family, FX-9590 weren't a special CPU, it was just FX-8350 with factory overclock that was pretty much lunatic compared to many especially earlier FX-3850's manually OCed to 5.0GHz with lower voltages and so better performance, same with Ryzens through the all generations with 3, 5, 7 and 9 all being pretty much one and the same fabricated chip but divided between working cores and further between achieved performance. Some features might work on some chips and with others they have huge problems that can be maybe fixed with microcode or not. Some features might have been fleshed out and developed far after the earlier CPU generator was finished and the features might require something extra from the CPU or the MB and it cannot be directly said that that feature will be working but later in the line when the microcode and all the else are being done for the next generation the feature might be found out to not needing anything extra and "here's the update".

 

But the thing is how do you reason software disabling?

You cannot say that the chip just cannot do that without you paying extra, that is just plain stupid. You cannot argue that some magic elf lives in the machine and refuses to let you use a feature without you sacrificing your first born to the great Santa. You cannot even argue with the pricing because even BMW won't be that stupid that they wouldn't cover the price of the heated seats with every sold car and the income from the monthly fees are 100% extra on top of that (and before you say, yes, HW locked CPUs probably cost to manufacture that much the lowest binned one is still sold with profit). Pretty much the only reason is, "Frack you, we want more money".