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The "this is for security" argument would make sense if they only locked CPUs that were sold by the vendor together with the motherboard, or if they had an acti
by ohazi 6y ago
The "this is for security" argument would make sense if they only locked CPUs that were sold by the vendor together with the motherboard, or if they had an action that an administrator could affirmatively take to lock the CPU.
But automatically, permanently "poisoning" any CPU that's inserted into the socket after a single boot? That sounds like it's being done for economic reasons.
They want to turn the used CPU market into a sketchball market for lemons so that everyone is so scared that they only buy board+CPU combos directly from the vendor rather than trying to save a few pennies here and there.
- caf 6y agoI don't know, when you think about what makes easier (cheaper) for the vendor, this way they just have to assemble the CPUs into the motherboards and ship the systems like they always have. I can't see that the market for enterprise system is heavily affected by grey market CPUs. Their customers are by and large buying these systems built & configured, and racking them up as they come. It'd be nice if there was a jumper you could set on the motherboard to stop it claiming a CPU though (maybe there even is?).
- dastx 6y agoMy understanding was that you can put this in any other motherboard with the same signing key. Presuming the intent her is that every single machine would have to have a different signing key. If this was the case, then yes, security seems to be the reason. However, and I may have misunderstood this so please do correct me if I have, based on the article, it seems for certain vendors, they share the same signing key with multiple machines (presuming whole lines), in which case this certainly seems to be about vendor lock-in from the vendor side.