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>I cannot coherently state my contempt for this notion... That's because your contempt is incoherent. Intel is selling consumers optionality. Pay a low price

>I cannot coherently state my contempt for this notion... That's because your contempt is incoherent. Intel is selling consumers optionality. Pay a low price now when you think you don't need a feature and pay more later if you do in fact need it. Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license.

phendrenad2 5y ago
Hit the nail on the head here. Hardware subscriptions are in a sense just an extension of software subscriptions. I can sell you a shiny new Dell 64-core Xeon workstation, but if you need to run AutoCAD, you'll need a subscription for that. The PC is useless to you without the subscription. If PCs were special-purpose, and you needed to buy a specific PC to run AutoCAD, it would only become more expensive. The fact that you can, at any time, sell that workstation monster to a gamer (who won't pay for the AutoCAD subscription) is part of it's enduring value.
reedciccio 5y ago
> >pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license. That's so... Naive? The reality is that the chips will cost the same and Intel will pocket the extra margin. And the rent. Consumers are already used to pay X for CPU, the price tolerance is already established. What makes you think that Intel will want to cut their profit margins?
- zamadatix 5y ago
  While I agree Intel will likely pocket more after this is implemented ever increasing costs seems more like a market problem (i.e. lack of competition or other pressures to incentivize lowering margins for greater total profit due to sales volume) and optimizations like this only make competition easier.
h2odragon 5y ago
> That's because your contempt is incoherent Actually its more I don't care to invest the time at the moment to attempt explaining why I object to the erosion of the very concept of "ownership" whereby we "own" things but some other entity still has legal rights over it and us in our interactions with this physical object. Flower patents are absurd but this shit is getting nasty.
dogleash 5y ago
>because we can design fewer chip variants They already use efuses in a single silicon design to differentiate on product features. How does this new license scheme enable fewer designs?
xg15 5y ago
> Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license. This is "it's your fault for making me hit you" bully logic. No one forced them to design multiple variants. If it's already cheaper to manufacture a full-capability chip, they could just distribute that one to all consumers and be done with it. Spending extra effort to put in a complex licensing logic that doesn't do anything else than disable features is pure greed.
glecedric 5y ago
Before you owned a nice full-featured i9 proc. You could go on Ebay and sell it for all its power. Tomorrow, you buy your new shiny basic i10 proc. You then pay extra to unlock the fast multiply for our games, the fast simd for you AI and the upgrade for 4K decoding. After a while, you decide to sell on Ebay. Well your nice shiny software defined features are now worthless. Well not for Intel which has the opportunity to sell the same stuff twice or more. What would be incoherent is for Intel to not juice this technology even more. Why not have a limited pool of licenses and let people compete for them monthly ?. The problem is that the boundary of ownership is getting shifted, and by the look of if the consumer will loose.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Hit the nail on the head here. Hardware subscriptions are in a sense just an extension of software subscriptions. I can sell you a shiny new Dell 64-core Xeon workstation, but if you need to run AutoCAD, you'll need a subscription for that. The PC is useless to you without the subscription. If PCs were special-purpose, and you needed to buy a specific PC to run AutoCAD, it would only become more expensive. The fact that you can, at any time, sell that workstation monster to a gamer (who won't pay for the AutoCAD subscription) is part of it's enduring value.

reedciccio 5y ago

> >pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license. That's so... Naive? The reality is that the chips will cost the same and Intel will pocket the extra margin. And the rent. Consumers are already used to pay X for CPU, the price tolerance is already established. What makes you think that Intel will want to cut their profit margins?

zamadatix 5y ago
While I agree Intel will likely pocket more after this is implemented ever increasing costs seems more like a market problem (i.e. lack of competition or other pressures to incentivize lowering margins for greater total profit due to sales volume) and optimizations like this only make competition easier.

h2odragon 5y ago

> That's because your contempt is incoherent Actually its more I don't care to invest the time at the moment to attempt explaining why I object to the erosion of the very concept of "ownership" whereby we "own" things but some other entity still has legal rights over it and us in our interactions with this physical object. Flower patents are absurd but this shit is getting nasty.

dogleash 5y ago

>because we can design fewer chip variants They already use efuses in a single silicon design to differentiate on product features. How does this new license scheme enable fewer designs?

xg15 5y ago

> Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license. This is "it's your fault for making me hit you" bully logic. No one forced them to design multiple variants. If it's already cheaper to manufacture a full-capability chip, they could just distribute that one to all consumers and be done with it. Spending extra effort to put in a complex licensing logic that doesn't do anything else than disable features is pure greed.

glecedric 5y ago

Before you owned a nice full-featured i9 proc. You could go on Ebay and sell it for all its power. Tomorrow, you buy your new shiny basic i10 proc. You then pay extra to unlock the fast multiply for our games, the fast simd for you AI and the upgrade for 4K decoding. After a while, you decide to sell on Ebay. Well your nice shiny software defined features are now worthless. Well not for Intel which has the opportunity to sell the same stuff twice or more. What would be incoherent is for Intel to not juice this technology even more. Why not have a limited pool of licenses and let people compete for them monthly ?. The problem is that the boundary of ownership is getting shifted, and by the look of if the consumer will loose.