19 ms·

Intel updates mysterious ‘software-defined silicon’ code in the Linux kernel

210 points by flipbrad 5y ago

vsskanth 5y ago
can someone kindly ELI5 what exactly is software defined silicon ? is it another term for FPGA ? or is it something more capable than that
- nikanj 5y ago
  Modern Nvidia cards detect you're trying to mine for cryptos, and artificially limit the performance of the silicon. It's the opposite of being capable - it's silicon that refuses to play to it's full capacity lest you buy an additional license.
  - quaintdev 5y ago
    That's just nuts. Sell me at what price you will but after I buy it, you should not control a single bit on my hardware. It's like we are going backward in progress.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      We are.
    - jrootabega 5y ago
      Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? Or to try to find a way to keep the pipeline for designing, building, and coding for gaming GPUs flowing?
      - DennisP 5y ago
        They sell another GPU specifically for mining, at twice the price. https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3090 https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3...
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        I think on the whole, Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining. It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty. So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.
        acchow 5y ago
        Exactly. If Nvidia removed the crypto crippling, almost all of their GPUs would be bought up for crypto mining leaving their gaming market empty. A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Meanwhile, Nvidia's production (and capital expenditure with it) could ramp up dramatically to meet crypto demand, until it too collapses. Then they are left with nothing but debt.
        Eelongate 5y ago
        > A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too. I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
        fomine3 5y ago
        Or they just buy PS5 or Xbox (both have AMD chip) and never go to PC gaming.
        marderfarker2 5y ago
        Jokes on you, consoles have also been out stock since forever.
      - mschuster91 5y ago
        > Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? No, they are trying to piss off the miners so that their actual customers (gamers) have a chance of getting GPUs again. It's like the first Bitcoin craze many years ago when the first CUDA miners came out - you could not find any GPU anywhere because people bought them for mining. Gamers were pissed as the miners outbid them everywhere. Once ASICs came out, the complete GPU market crashed - suddenly there was a massive supply of second-hand GPUs from miners... the gamers snatched these up, and NVIDIA suddenly had the problem that their new GPU sales crashed. The only difference is that this time it isn't Bitcoin anymore but a whole bunch of random shitcoins.
    - htrp 5y ago
      We had the same thing in software and in media content.
    - mperham 5y ago
      Who’s “we”? You are going backward. NVIDIA’s profits are going forward.
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        Justify your statement that the poster is «going backward». Clearly the poster means, "in terms of values".
    - paulmd 5y ago
      This has been the norm for a long time - the AMD Hawaii GPU was sold as the 290X to gamers with FP64 artificially crippled to run much more slowly than normal, and then sold at a much higher price to other richer customers who use them to make money as the Radeon Pro series (in the case of Hawaii - it was the FirePro S9150 and S9100). Traditionally it has been FP64 performance, as well as things like looking at the OpenGL calls and artificially limiting performance when something looks like a CAD workload (see: the big increase when NVIDIA removed the limitations on Titan X professional workloads after Vega FE came out). Somehow nobody shed a tear for the poor enterprise customers until miners came along. But that's what it is, miners are enterprise customers, they use them to make a profit. Similarly, almost all R5 consumer processors are made by artificially disabling fully functional cores on R7 chiplets. AMD already had nearly 80% of the chips coming off the line with 8 functional cores at Zen2 launch, and numbers have only gotten better since there. Yeah, maybe a few fail clock bins or other things, but those bins are chosen very loosely such that they're not throwing away any significant amount of chips anyway. The overwhelming majority of R5s are perfectly good chips being gimped and sold as lower chips, because the availability and demand are exactly opposite of each other - they have the highest availability of 8-core chiplets and the highest demand for 4- and 6-core chiplets. How do you square the two? Not by lowering prices of your high-margin products - you keep those high to extract the maximum price from price-insensitive consumers, and you artificially gimp a bunch of them for the rest of the market to protect your profits in the higher segment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination The thing to remember is that home users are almost always the beneficiary of market segmentation, because we are the most price sensitive. The alternative to Core-vs-Xeon-E segmentation isn't that everyone gets Xeons at i5 pricing, it's that the i5 now costs almost as much as a Xeon. The R&D has to be paid back one way or another, or else R&D will be significantly reduced (most likely meaning much longer product generations and slower moves to new nodes, etc). Price discrimination means enterprise customers pay more than their share and home customers pay less than their share, so if market segmentation goes away and those equalize then home customers will have to bear more of their fair share of the product cost. Again, who wants to race to pay more for their gaming graphics card so that Boeing and cryptominers can pay less? It would be great if everything were free, or priced at its true cost, but in the real world R&D needs to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the other thing is Enterprise customers actually love this, it's called Capacity on Demand and I'm sure the reason Intel is doing this is because their customers keep asking for it. Sun, Oracle, Fujitsu, IBM - all the big enteprise vendors will sell you a machine with a bunch of cpu and memory that you're not allowed to use or touch! But if your workload scales up, instead of having to shut down your mainframe to upgrade it, you can just pay money and turn the cores on! And sure, it would be nice if all software were just microservices that you could re-instantiate onto another machine, but some stuff (like databases) can't be trivially scaled and partitioning (read: stale data reads) can't be tolerated. The only surefire answer to CAP theorem is One Big Machine such that you never have to deal with splits in the first plac, and that's what some situations need, and they love this.
  - mmis1000 5y ago
    Technically all 30 series video card came with virtual gpu support no matter it is consumer one or professional one. Just they are disabled by default and need a secret activation code from driver. Someone cracked it and enabled them with custom driver. (And of course nvidia patched it out in the latest vbios to make the bypass impossible). There is the story of this on HN few month a go.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Back in the 1990s you could buy a big IBM mainframe with 8 CPUs, and they'd ship you one with 16 CPUs and if you decided to upgrade later, they just sent a guy to flip a secret switch. This was never popular with the Free Software crowd, who believe in the principle that the owner of the hardware has the right to do whatever they like with it. They would say you have the right to flip the secret switch yourself. This is the same idea, but updated for the 21st century. My laptop came with hardware support for virtual machines - In a few years time, perhaps features like hardware-accelerated virtual machine support will be separately licensed premium features, instead of being stock features. Some companies already do this - for example, some Teslas have autopilot and long range batteries, but they're disabled in software. And if you buy a Tesla with those features second-hand, Tesla can disable them until you pay them.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    So, free upgrades in a couple years when this inevitably gets broken in to?
    - monocasa 5y ago
      I don't think it's inevitable that this'll be broken into. Public/private crypto in high end process nodes has a pretty good track record.
  - RHSeeger 5y ago
    > And if you buy a Tesla with those features second-hand, Tesla can disable them until you pay them. Everything I've seen says this is not the case. As I understand it, the story in the news about "something like this" was misleading. The car went through a dealer and was sold certified pre-owned; and it was sold as not having those features. It turns out they forgot the disable those features. I you buy one from a third party that already paid for the feature, it stays with the car. At least, that's the understanding I was left with.
    - DebtDeflation 5y ago
      > The car went through a dealer and was sold certified pre-owned; and it was sold as not having those features. Was the car sold to its original owner with those features enabled? If so, it's effectively the same as the original story reported, meaning that Tesla expected to be paid twice for the feature.
luma 5y ago
> The code outlined a process for enabling new features by verifying cryptographically signed licences This smells a lot like laying the groundwork for locking processor features behind a license key. Get ready for a monthly CPU license plan...
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Ahem https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/
  - reasonabl_human 5y ago
    Hadn’t seen this before.. and this license key operates at the hardware level, not the OS level? One can’t expect mpeg hw decide to function with arch or nix installed on a raspberry pi instead?
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Hardware level. It's a compromise imposed on the chip builders because the MPEG decoder or part thereof that they're using is subject to patent licensing. So in order to not pay the patent license, it's shipped locked-out. When you pay them a chunk goes back to the licensor (presumably MPEG-LA).
      - colejohnson66 5y ago
        Although the later models have fast enough CPUs to not need the hardware decoding
      - ksec 5y ago
        >(presumably MPEG-LA). MPEG 2 has been patent free since 2018 in US and 2020 worldwide. Along with AAC-LC. They are charging for license key for the usage of that specific decoder block only. i.e The IP of the actual HW decoder, not the codec itself. MPEG 2 and VC1 is so low in complexity you are software decode it with minimal CPU resource on RPi 4.
coldacid 5y ago
Whatever happened to having chips that didn't have all this secretive scummy nonsense behind it? I feel like we should just roll back to the 68k era at this point.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  ACPI is to blame because it specifically enabled laptop manufacturers to hide platform hardware details behind a shitty firmware interface instead of providing OS drivers/hardware details to driver developers, and it was around that time that SMI became a thing on Intel CPUs and platform firmware started to use that for fan control, instead of depending on the OS to do that.
  - StillBored 5y ago
    ACPI is a huge part of the reason that linux works at all on x86, and in many cases is as popular as it is. If it acted more like arm boards where pretty much nothing works right, no one would use it for general purpose computing. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of drivers for PMICs, clock dividers, GPIO pin muxing/etc for the hundred or so boards that sorta work, and each one needs customization that takes months/years every time something gets tweaked on the board/etc. ACPI allows random x86 board vendors to literally have hundreds of products themselves that not only boot linux, but a pile of other OS's because they aren't wasting their time writing drivers for every single board and voltage regulator. So, call it shitty, but understand that its the reason you can boot a single linux image on everything from an atomicPi, to HP superdome flex, and the thousands of desktops/etc being customized by people in their bedrooms. Its also largely the reason why linux works on 20 year old PC's that no one is actually testing on anymore. The alternative is a monoculture where the HW is basically provided by a single vendor that doesn't change much and provides a half dozen supported configurations. I would point to the zseries here because that is effectively how it works, but it also has a huge hw/firmware abstract machine that allows IBM to change the underlying HW details without having to rewrite all this low value garbage.
    - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
1cvmask 5y ago
Intel seems to be on a mission to slide into historical irrelevance. Rome didn't die in a day and neither will Intel. I think this gives new meaning to planned obsolescence.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Intel and AMD don't build features no one asks for. TPM and SecureBoot came directly from large customers requesting exactly that. HN (and more broadly, PC users) aren't all of the market for CPUs.
  - temac 5y ago
    You seem to imply customers demand bridled CPUs. Thinking about it, there is one scenario for which their "sw-defined silicon" (hello newspeak) would both make sense and not be too much of a fuckery: instead of their regular process that now consists of shipping unvalidated HW and waiting for complaints about bugs for triggering chicken bits in the next microcode, they could ship processor with only the properly validated parts enabled at first, and make people pay for extra perf or features when the remaining validation is actually completed and if it passes. I do not really believe this is their intent thought: people are way too much continuing to act like mean 5% better perf on arbitrary benchmarks has any significance (even regardless of power consumption). So Intel will likely continue to ship broken but allegedly fast processors, and will continue to kill the perfs to remove the bugs once they sold enough. Plus, in a competitive market, it would be an equilibrium hard to achieve if competitors are not making pay for their own deferred enablement.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      There definitely are major customers (for example, cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot. It's not not something imposed by Intel, those features are required by an important part of the market, ignored by another important part of the market (unsophisticated consumers), and opposed by an small part of the market which is highly represented among tech and privacy enthusiasts here on HN, but is not really significant in size.
gentleman11 5y ago
Is amd the same about adding secret blobs to their hardware?
- my123 5y ago
  Yeah, the PSP with its opaque firmware even handles DRAM initialisation on Zen processors, so that you cannot run without it at all.
  - mrcode007 5y ago
    A lot of DDR initialization code is heavily patented and often considered a “trade secret” which is why it’s rarely released and publicized. It’s not that complicated if you know hardware and work with the official internal data sheet. I’ve seen those as part of partnership between CPU vendors and my workplace. You get to read them on a special Remote Desktop so you don’t copy them. Same for ME. Once you know what’s actually in the code the conspiracy theories do seem funny :)
    - my123 5y ago
      The code involved isn’t even that long… but mistakes can result in very annoying behavior. Debugging issues with that code is a pain.
      - mrcode007 5y ago
        Yes, it’s a huge pain to the point where you don’t want to be stuck fielding support calls from enthusiasts tweaking things on their own. Huge pain in debugging this code
    - coldacid 5y ago
      The conspiracy theories are funny, but the bullshit situation of being locked out of things you yourself OWN isn't. I think that's what most of us hate about things like ME or PSP.
      - 5y ago
seanhunter 5y ago
This reminds me of a story told to me by a work colleague who began his career on Mainframes in the late 70s. One work place he was at paid several million for a major upgrade to their IBM mainframe. A guy in a white lab coat showed up, took the side panel off the mainframe, removed a circuit board and gave them a piece of paper to sign saying the job was complete.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Isn't this the same as SaaS thinking, albeit in the hardware era? For the more common story of IBM enabling present but disabled memory, they couldn't magically teleport a new memory board into your mainframe. But they could ship your mainframe with extra, verified but disabled memory. Customer UX for memory upgrades then changes from "Wait for it to ship, etc" to "We'll have it done tonight."
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    Yes indeed. These kind of things afflict enterprise IT all the time. I used to run b2c teams which dealt with big banks. One bank's IT department used to bill internally for data center costs using RAM as a proxy for energy usage. A big spark cluster was purchased for the project I worked on and the minimum RAM for the spec of machine that was "standard" was 128MB, so to "save costs" they had the data center guy take out half the memory in every machine before racking it up. :-(
- PeterisP 5y ago
  It's not an ancient practice, I recall a case in the early 2000s where we got an expensive CPU upgrade to a mainframe which was not implemented by "a guy in a white lab coat" but as a one-line script (with a cryptographic key) to unlock more CPUs which were already installed on the system when it was first shipped.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    There are Cisco Nexus switches today that require licensing to enable all the ports.
mijoharas 5y ago
> We were sceptical of that assertion because making the effort to add code to the Linux kernel without planning for it to be used is thoroughly counter-intuitive I mean... this seems like a very good point, but from the rest of the article, and the previous one, it sounds like the patch was approved? Why was this allowed into the kernel? looks like drivers/platform/x86/intel/* mostly. Does intel just "own" that section of code? who accepts these patches? I'm not particularly familiar with this stuff so would appreciate someone filling me in on this.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  > I mean... this seems like a very good point, but from the rest of the article, and the previous one, it sounds like the patch was approved? Intel actually said, in a short snippet where The Register refers to them as "Chipzilla", "If we plan to implement these updates in future products we will provide a deeper explanation of how they are implemented at that time.". One interpretation could be they are saying they haven't figured out if they are going to implement this in anything so they just added it for fun... I'd call that the "makes a good article" interpretation. The other interpretation is they plan to use the feature but have not yet finished planning which products will use it to unlock what and will talk about it in more detailed once planned, I'd call that the "corporatespeak decoded version". If you were a literal interpretation bot I would still say the corporatespeak version fits better than the article filler version hence why the extrapolations with that version don't match up to what is happening. > Why was this allowed into the kernel? looks like drivers/platform/x86/intel/* mostly. Does intel just "own" that section of code? who accepts these patches? I didn't look if it was actually accepted yet or just a proposed patchset but generally Intel will be the maintainers for Intel code (but not always) and they are one of the larger contributors to the kernel overall. You can see more details about maintainers and reviewers (as well as maintainers for sections of code) here https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS#:~:text=One%20job%20the%20maintainers%20(and,feature%20ready%20for%20next%20time https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS#:~:text=One%20j....
  - mijoharas 5y ago
    Thanks for that maintainers link. That's exactly what I was looking for. It seems that a lot of the changes in the patchset are in the intel pmt driver, which is maintained by the author of the patch, so that makes sense why the maintainer included it.
thedougd 5y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302045 Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features after license activation
dirtyv 5y ago
Sounds like Intel plans on doing the same thing with their chips that Tesla does with its batteries.
mdp2021 5y ago
What will this practice mean on airgapped machines? Probably that their hardware will only work at a fraction of the capabilities. But not necessarily only that: unlocking hardware features my mean, depending on implementation, that at some point in time a network connection is assumed.
- wmf 5y ago
  You should install the license the same way you install other software.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    > the same way you install other software You mean, completely anonymously, and without any association of a machine to an owner? I install software through `adb install software.apk`, or through `make`, or similar, of packages stored on drive... I am not sure this can be the model, for this new "unlocking hardware features" scheme. Many will just say, "No "thank" you" - and I am not sure about all the practical consequences. I am even more concerned that this facilitates preparing the way for taking for granted some practice like "register after purchase to be enabled for using the product", which I am informed some already attempted.
literallyaduck 5y ago
Binary blobs are a security threat, a right to repairs threat, an ownership threat.
- userbinator 5y ago
  The last one is the scariest. No doubt this is all part of the "you will own nothing" movement, which some people are still dismissing as a mere conspiracy theory when there's tons of evidence for what is really happening.
anamax 5y ago
There was at least one IBM machine that had a similar "feature". It could run in slow-mode or fast-mode. Always-on fast-mode cost more per month than slow-mode. (Yes, these machines were leased, not sold.) However, you could get "fast-mode" on an as-needed/hourly-basis, for a "small" fee of course.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mirker 5y ago
  The precursor to cloud provisioning, I see.
jiggawatts 5y ago
I was just thinking this morning that Intel segments their market by the class of person that is their customer. "You're a consumer, you don't need error correcting memory! Only the upper class, I mean... your superiors... err.. sorry, enterprise customers need that feature. It's reserved for them, it is not for the likes of you." Meanwhile AMD basically sells silicon by unit area. It's like buying gelato at the ice cream shop. You can ask for one scoop, two scoops, or three. You get to decide how hungry you are, that's it. There isn't a flavour with broken glass in it[1] served only to the working class stiffs, and with the glass-free gelato reserved only for the gentry. [1] This is pretty much what a CPU without ECC is. It randomly crashes and corrupts your data. Look. Not every bite of ice cream has glass in it! There's very little glass in the ice cream. It's super rare, and Intel Pty Ltd tells you that this is an acceptable amount of risk for you to take, because you aren't as important as other people.
- woah 5y ago
  Intel's cost is designing the circuits and the means to etch them, not buying the sand.
- my123 5y ago
  > and Intel Pty Ltd tells you that this is an acceptable amount of risk for you to take AMD does the same thing too. Ryzen APUs don't have (even unofficial) ECC support, except if you pony up for a Ryzen Pro one. (and so do many other SoC providers...)
  - StillBored 5y ago
    Official support, doesn't mean it doesn't work. Although your right AMD does a bit of product segmentation here/there. The laptop space while considerably simpler is not only segmented by core count, but threading, and TDP. I've been expecting them to just simplify to a core count/memory channel/socket matrix for a while because they are so close. There really isn't any reason these days to segment by frequency beyond maybe a couple golden parts where all the cores run at the peak frequency.
    - 5y ago
TedShiller 5y ago
DRM?
charcircuit 5y ago
I think it would be cool to just be able to instantly get improvements to my machine without having to go through the hassle of dealing with ordering and installing physical hardware.
tiffanyh 5y ago
People get bent out of shape with Intel doing this yet rave in using an Apple M1 MacBook Pro which is entirely 100% custom / proprietary silicon. HN cracks me up.
- detaro 5y ago
  "People" also think Apple laptops are stupid and overpriced. HN is not a homogeneous group with a single opinion on every topic, so such "gotcha" arguments make little sense.
phendrenad2 5y ago
People are acting like this is being implemented in consumer CPUs. I don't see any indication of that. This is likely for people who need powerful on-site compute, but can't afford (or don't yet need) the most powerful version of Intel CPUs. This is a way to shave down the price tag, by letting people buy the most powerful CPU, but restricting it down to what you actually need/can afford, so Intel can sell it to you at a subsidized discount.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  (Also, upgrading CPUs costs labor, so having the CPU "pre-upgraded" is another cost savings)
fuckchina 5y ago
Time to face the truth, Intel sucks, even their CEO talk like shit[1] [1]: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371659 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371659

210 points by flipbrad 5y ago

can someone kindly ELI5 what exactly is software defined silicon ? is it another term for FPGA ? or is it something more capable than that

nikanj 5y ago
Modern Nvidia cards detect you're trying to mine for cryptos, and artificially limit the performance of the silicon. It's the opposite of being capable - it's silicon that refuses to play to it's full capacity lest you buy an additional license.
- quaintdev 5y ago
  That's just nuts. Sell me at what price you will but after I buy it, you should not control a single bit on my hardware. It's like we are going backward in progress.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    We are.
  - jrootabega 5y ago
    Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? Or to try to find a way to keep the pipeline for designing, building, and coding for gaming GPUs flowing?
    - DennisP 5y ago
      They sell another GPU specifically for mining, at twice the price. https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3090 https://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/CMP-170HX-price-double-RTX-3...
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I think on the whole, Nvidia isn't thrilled about crypto mining. It made them a lot of money, but they (rightly so) look at it as margin that could evaporate tomorrow. And in the mean time pisses their core users off (through volume availability issues) and makes an already difficult production -> retail supply chain even more bursty. So how do you deal with that? Well, a not-terrible way is artificially segmenting your market. Crypto folks, over here in this pool with huge waves. Everyone else, back to business as usual.
      - acchow 5y ago
        Exactly. If Nvidia removed the crypto crippling, almost all of their GPUs would be bought up for crypto mining leaving their gaming market empty. A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Meanwhile, Nvidia's production (and capital expenditure with it) could ramp up dramatically to meet crypto demand, until it too collapses. Then they are left with nothing but debt.
        Eelongate 5y ago
        > A new entrant would come in and take up their gaming market. Miners would probably find a way to use that new entrant's GPUs for mining too. I think the real threat is that mining could chill the gaming industry as a whole. Either by pricing tons of people out of gaming so they find new hobbies and maybe never come back, or by influencing the direction of game development away from advanced graphics. If most gamers can't afford top-end GPUs anymore, then the perceived value of [Latest Game] having the most photorealistic graphics yet could be flipped into the negative by a change in gamer culture.
        fomine3 5y ago
        Or they just buy PS5 or Xbox (both have AMD chip) and never go to PC gaming.
        marderfarker2 5y ago
        Jokes on you, consoles have also been out stock since forever.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      > Are they doing it to get a bigger cut of miners' funds? No, they are trying to piss off the miners so that their actual customers (gamers) have a chance of getting GPUs again. It's like the first Bitcoin craze many years ago when the first CUDA miners came out - you could not find any GPU anywhere because people bought them for mining. Gamers were pissed as the miners outbid them everywhere. Once ASICs came out, the complete GPU market crashed - suddenly there was a massive supply of second-hand GPUs from miners... the gamers snatched these up, and NVIDIA suddenly had the problem that their new GPU sales crashed. The only difference is that this time it isn't Bitcoin anymore but a whole bunch of random shitcoins.
  - htrp 5y ago
    We had the same thing in software and in media content.
  - mperham 5y ago
    Who’s “we”? You are going backward. NVIDIA’s profits are going forward.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      Justify your statement that the poster is «going backward». Clearly the poster means, "in terms of values".
  - paulmd 5y ago
    This has been the norm for a long time - the AMD Hawaii GPU was sold as the 290X to gamers with FP64 artificially crippled to run much more slowly than normal, and then sold at a much higher price to other richer customers who use them to make money as the Radeon Pro series (in the case of Hawaii - it was the FirePro S9150 and S9100). Traditionally it has been FP64 performance, as well as things like looking at the OpenGL calls and artificially limiting performance when something looks like a CAD workload (see: the big increase when NVIDIA removed the limitations on Titan X professional workloads after Vega FE came out). Somehow nobody shed a tear for the poor enterprise customers until miners came along. But that's what it is, miners are enterprise customers, they use them to make a profit. Similarly, almost all R5 consumer processors are made by artificially disabling fully functional cores on R7 chiplets. AMD already had nearly 80% of the chips coming off the line with 8 functional cores at Zen2 launch, and numbers have only gotten better since there. Yeah, maybe a few fail clock bins or other things, but those bins are chosen very loosely such that they're not throwing away any significant amount of chips anyway. The overwhelming majority of R5s are perfectly good chips being gimped and sold as lower chips, because the availability and demand are exactly opposite of each other - they have the highest availability of 8-core chiplets and the highest demand for 4- and 6-core chiplets. How do you square the two? Not by lowering prices of your high-margin products - you keep those high to extract the maximum price from price-insensitive consumers, and you artificially gimp a bunch of them for the rest of the market to protect your profits in the higher segment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination The thing to remember is that home users are almost always the beneficiary of market segmentation, because we are the most price sensitive. The alternative to Core-vs-Xeon-E segmentation isn't that everyone gets Xeons at i5 pricing, it's that the i5 now costs almost as much as a Xeon. The R&D has to be paid back one way or another, or else R&D will be significantly reduced (most likely meaning much longer product generations and slower moves to new nodes, etc). Price discrimination means enterprise customers pay more than their share and home customers pay less than their share, so if market segmentation goes away and those equalize then home customers will have to bear more of their fair share of the product cost. Again, who wants to race to pay more for their gaming graphics card so that Boeing and cryptominers can pay less? It would be great if everything were free, or priced at its true cost, but in the real world R&D needs to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the other thing is Enterprise customers actually love this, it's called Capacity on Demand and I'm sure the reason Intel is doing this is because their customers keep asking for it. Sun, Oracle, Fujitsu, IBM - all the big enteprise vendors will sell you a machine with a bunch of cpu and memory that you're not allowed to use or touch! But if your workload scales up, instead of having to shut down your mainframe to upgrade it, you can just pay money and turn the cores on! And sure, it would be nice if all software were just microservices that you could re-instantiate onto another machine, but some stuff (like databases) can't be trivially scaled and partitioning (read: stale data reads) can't be tolerated. The only surefire answer to CAP theorem is One Big Machine such that you never have to deal with splits in the first plac, and that's what some situations need, and they love this.
- mmis1000 5y ago
  Technically all 30 series video card came with virtual gpu support no matter it is consumer one or professional one. Just they are disabled by default and need a secret activation code from driver. Someone cracked it and enabled them with custom driver. (And of course nvidia patched it out in the latest vbios to make the bypass impossible). There is the story of this on HN few month a go.
michaelt 5y ago
Back in the 1990s you could buy a big IBM mainframe with 8 CPUs, and they'd ship you one with 16 CPUs and if you decided to upgrade later, they just sent a guy to flip a secret switch. This was never popular with the Free Software crowd, who believe in the principle that the owner of the hardware has the right to do whatever they like with it. They would say you have the right to flip the secret switch yourself. This is the same idea, but updated for the 21st century. My laptop came with hardware support for virtual machines - In a few years time, perhaps features like hardware-accelerated virtual machine support will be separately licensed premium features, instead of being stock features. Some companies already do this - for example, some Teslas have autopilot and long range batteries, but they're disabled in software. And if you buy a Tesla with those features second-hand, Tesla can disable them until you pay them.
- bee_rider 5y ago
  So, free upgrades in a couple years when this inevitably gets broken in to?
  - monocasa 5y ago
    I don't think it's inevitable that this'll be broken into. Public/private crypto in high end process nodes has a pretty good track record.
- RHSeeger 5y ago
  > And if you buy a Tesla with those features second-hand, Tesla can disable them until you pay them. Everything I've seen says this is not the case. As I understand it, the story in the news about "something like this" was misleading. The car went through a dealer and was sold certified pre-owned; and it was sold as not having those features. It turns out they forgot the disable those features. I you buy one from a third party that already paid for the feature, it stays with the car. At least, that's the understanding I was left with.
  - DebtDeflation 5y ago
    > The car went through a dealer and was sold certified pre-owned; and it was sold as not having those features. Was the car sold to its original owner with those features enabled? If so, it's effectively the same as the original story reported, meaning that Tesla expected to be paid twice for the feature.

luma 5y ago

> The code outlined a process for enabling new features by verifying cryptographically signed licences This smells a lot like laying the groundwork for locking processor features behind a license key. Get ready for a monthly CPU license plan...

johnchristopher 5y ago
Ahem https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/
- reasonabl_human 5y ago
  Hadn’t seen this before.. and this license key operates at the hardware level, not the OS level? One can’t expect mpeg hw decide to function with arch or nix installed on a raspberry pi instead?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Hardware level. It's a compromise imposed on the chip builders because the MPEG decoder or part thereof that they're using is subject to patent licensing. So in order to not pay the patent license, it's shipped locked-out. When you pay them a chunk goes back to the licensor (presumably MPEG-LA).
    - colejohnson66 5y ago
      Although the later models have fast enough CPUs to not need the hardware decoding
    - ksec 5y ago
      >(presumably MPEG-LA). MPEG 2 has been patent free since 2018 in US and 2020 worldwide. Along with AAC-LC. They are charging for license key for the usage of that specific decoder block only. i.e The IP of the actual HW decoder, not the codec itself. MPEG 2 and VC1 is so low in complexity you are software decode it with minimal CPU resource on RPi 4.

coldacid 5y ago

Whatever happened to having chips that didn't have all this secretive scummy nonsense behind it? I feel like we should just roll back to the 68k era at this point.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago
ACPI is to blame because it specifically enabled laptop manufacturers to hide platform hardware details behind a shitty firmware interface instead of providing OS drivers/hardware details to driver developers, and it was around that time that SMI became a thing on Intel CPUs and platform firmware started to use that for fan control, instead of depending on the OS to do that.
- StillBored 5y ago
  ACPI is a huge part of the reason that linux works at all on x86, and in many cases is as popular as it is. If it acted more like arm boards where pretty much nothing works right, no one would use it for general purpose computing. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of drivers for PMICs, clock dividers, GPIO pin muxing/etc for the hundred or so boards that sorta work, and each one needs customization that takes months/years every time something gets tweaked on the board/etc. ACPI allows random x86 board vendors to literally have hundreds of products themselves that not only boot linux, but a pile of other OS's because they aren't wasting their time writing drivers for every single board and voltage regulator. So, call it shitty, but understand that its the reason you can boot a single linux image on everything from an atomicPi, to HP superdome flex, and the thousands of desktops/etc being customized by people in their bedrooms. Its also largely the reason why linux works on 20 year old PC's that no one is actually testing on anymore. The alternative is a monoculture where the HW is basically provided by a single vendor that doesn't change much and provides a half dozen supported configurations. I would point to the zseries here because that is effectively how it works, but it also has a huge hw/firmware abstract machine that allows IBM to change the underlying HW details without having to rewrite all this low value garbage.
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago

1cvmask 5y ago

Intel seems to be on a mission to slide into historical irrelevance. Rome didn't die in a day and neither will Intel. I think this gives new meaning to planned obsolescence.

ethbr0 5y ago
Intel and AMD don't build features no one asks for. TPM and SecureBoot came directly from large customers requesting exactly that. HN (and more broadly, PC users) aren't all of the market for CPUs.
- temac 5y ago
  You seem to imply customers demand bridled CPUs. Thinking about it, there is one scenario for which their "sw-defined silicon" (hello newspeak) would both make sense and not be too much of a fuckery: instead of their regular process that now consists of shipping unvalidated HW and waiting for complaints about bugs for triggering chicken bits in the next microcode, they could ship processor with only the properly validated parts enabled at first, and make people pay for extra perf or features when the remaining validation is actually completed and if it passes. I do not really believe this is their intent thought: people are way too much continuing to act like mean 5% better perf on arbitrary benchmarks has any significance (even regardless of power consumption). So Intel will likely continue to ship broken but allegedly fast processors, and will continue to kill the perfs to remove the bugs once they sold enough. Plus, in a competitive market, it would be an equilibrium hard to achieve if competitors are not making pay for their own deferred enablement.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    There definitely are major customers (for example, cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot. It's not not something imposed by Intel, those features are required by an important part of the market, ignored by another important part of the market (unsophisticated consumers), and opposed by an small part of the market which is highly represented among tech and privacy enthusiasts here on HN, but is not really significant in size.

gentleman11 5y ago

Is amd the same about adding secret blobs to their hardware?

my123 5y ago
Yeah, the PSP with its opaque firmware even handles DRAM initialisation on Zen processors, so that you cannot run without it at all.
- mrcode007 5y ago
  A lot of DDR initialization code is heavily patented and often considered a “trade secret” which is why it’s rarely released and publicized. It’s not that complicated if you know hardware and work with the official internal data sheet. I’ve seen those as part of partnership between CPU vendors and my workplace. You get to read them on a special Remote Desktop so you don’t copy them. Same for ME. Once you know what’s actually in the code the conspiracy theories do seem funny :)
  - my123 5y ago
    The code involved isn’t even that long… but mistakes can result in very annoying behavior. Debugging issues with that code is a pain.
    - mrcode007 5y ago
      Yes, it’s a huge pain to the point where you don’t want to be stuck fielding support calls from enthusiasts tweaking things on their own. Huge pain in debugging this code
  - coldacid 5y ago
    The conspiracy theories are funny, but the bullshit situation of being locked out of things you yourself OWN isn't. I think that's what most of us hate about things like ME or PSP.
    - 5y ago

seanhunter 5y ago

This reminds me of a story told to me by a work colleague who began his career on Mainframes in the late 70s. One work place he was at paid several million for a major upgrade to their IBM mainframe. A guy in a white lab coat showed up, took the side panel off the mainframe, removed a circuit board and gave them a piece of paper to sign saying the job was complete.

ethbr0 5y ago
Isn't this the same as SaaS thinking, albeit in the hardware era? For the more common story of IBM enabling present but disabled memory, they couldn't magically teleport a new memory board into your mainframe. But they could ship your mainframe with extra, verified but disabled memory. Customer UX for memory upgrades then changes from "Wait for it to ship, etc" to "We'll have it done tonight."
- seanhunter 5y ago
  Yes indeed. These kind of things afflict enterprise IT all the time. I used to run b2c teams which dealt with big banks. One bank's IT department used to bill internally for data center costs using RAM as a proxy for energy usage. A big spark cluster was purchased for the project I worked on and the minimum RAM for the spec of machine that was "standard" was 128MB, so to "save costs" they had the data center guy take out half the memory in every machine before racking it up. :-(
PeterisP 5y ago
It's not an ancient practice, I recall a case in the early 2000s where we got an expensive CPU upgrade to a mainframe which was not implemented by "a guy in a white lab coat" but as a one-line script (with a cryptographic key) to unlock more CPUs which were already installed on the system when it was first shipped.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  There are Cisco Nexus switches today that require licensing to enable all the ports.

mijoharas 5y ago

> We were sceptical of that assertion because making the effort to add code to the Linux kernel without planning for it to be used is thoroughly counter-intuitive I mean... this seems like a very good point, but from the rest of the article, and the previous one, it sounds like the patch was approved? Why was this allowed into the kernel? looks like drivers/platform/x86/intel/* mostly. Does intel just "own" that section of code? who accepts these patches? I'm not particularly familiar with this stuff so would appreciate someone filling me in on this.

zamadatix 5y ago
> I mean... this seems like a very good point, but from the rest of the article, and the previous one, it sounds like the patch was approved? Intel actually said, in a short snippet where The Register refers to them as "Chipzilla", "If we plan to implement these updates in future products we will provide a deeper explanation of how they are implemented at that time.". One interpretation could be they are saying they haven't figured out if they are going to implement this in anything so they just added it for fun... I'd call that the "makes a good article" interpretation. The other interpretation is they plan to use the feature but have not yet finished planning which products will use it to unlock what and will talk about it in more detailed once planned, I'd call that the "corporatespeak decoded version". If you were a literal interpretation bot I would still say the corporatespeak version fits better than the article filler version hence why the extrapolations with that version don't match up to what is happening. > Why was this allowed into the kernel? looks like drivers/platform/x86/intel/* mostly. Does intel just "own" that section of code? who accepts these patches? I didn't look if it was actually accepted yet or just a proposed patchset but generally Intel will be the maintainers for Intel code (but not always) and they are one of the larger contributors to the kernel overall. You can see more details about maintainers and reviewers (as well as maintainers for sections of code) here https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS#:~:text=One%20job%20the%20maintainers%20(and,feature%20ready%20for%20next%20time https://www.kernel.org/doc/linux/MAINTAINERS#:~:text=One%20j....
- mijoharas 5y ago
  Thanks for that maintainers link. That's exactly what I was looking for. It seems that a lot of the changes in the patchset are in the intel pmt driver, which is maintained by the author of the patch, so that makes sense why the maintainer included it.

thedougd 5y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29302045 Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features after license activation

dirtyv 5y ago

Sounds like Intel plans on doing the same thing with their chips that Tesla does with its batteries.

mdp2021 5y ago

What will this practice mean on airgapped machines? Probably that their hardware will only work at a fraction of the capabilities. But not necessarily only that: unlocking hardware features my mean, depending on implementation, that at some point in time a network connection is assumed.

wmf 5y ago
You should install the license the same way you install other software.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  > the same way you install other software You mean, completely anonymously, and without any association of a machine to an owner? I install software through `adb install software.apk`, or through `make`, or similar, of packages stored on drive... I am not sure this can be the model, for this new "unlocking hardware features" scheme. Many will just say, "No "thank" you" - and I am not sure about all the practical consequences. I am even more concerned that this facilitates preparing the way for taking for granted some practice like "register after purchase to be enabled for using the product", which I am informed some already attempted.

literallyaduck 5y ago

Binary blobs are a security threat, a right to repairs threat, an ownership threat.

userbinator 5y ago
The last one is the scariest. No doubt this is all part of the "you will own nothing" movement, which some people are still dismissing as a mere conspiracy theory when there's tons of evidence for what is really happening.

anamax 5y ago

There was at least one IBM machine that had a similar "feature". It could run in slow-mode or fast-mode. Always-on fast-mode cost more per month than slow-mode. (Yes, these machines were leased, not sold.) However, you could get "fast-mode" on an as-needed/hourly-basis, for a "small" fee of course.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mirker 5y ago
The precursor to cloud provisioning, I see.

jiggawatts 5y ago

I was just thinking this morning that Intel segments their market by the class of person that is their customer. "You're a consumer, you don't need error correcting memory! Only the upper class, I mean... your superiors... err.. sorry, enterprise customers need that feature. It's reserved for them, it is not for the likes of you." Meanwhile AMD basically sells silicon by unit area. It's like buying gelato at the ice cream shop. You can ask for one scoop, two scoops, or three. You get to decide how hungry you are, that's it. There isn't a flavour with broken glass in it[1] served only to the working class stiffs, and with the glass-free gelato reserved only for the gentry. [1] This is pretty much what a CPU without ECC is. It randomly crashes and corrupts your data. Look. Not every bite of ice cream has glass in it! There's very little glass in the ice cream. It's super rare, and Intel Pty Ltd tells you that this is an acceptable amount of risk for you to take, because you aren't as important as other people.

woah 5y ago
Intel's cost is designing the circuits and the means to etch them, not buying the sand.
my123 5y ago
> and Intel Pty Ltd tells you that this is an acceptable amount of risk for you to take AMD does the same thing too. Ryzen APUs don't have (even unofficial) ECC support, except if you pony up for a Ryzen Pro one. (and so do many other SoC providers...)
- StillBored 5y ago
  Official support, doesn't mean it doesn't work. Although your right AMD does a bit of product segmentation here/there. The laptop space while considerably simpler is not only segmented by core count, but threading, and TDP. I've been expecting them to just simplify to a core count/memory channel/socket matrix for a while because they are so close. There really isn't any reason these days to segment by frequency beyond maybe a couple golden parts where all the cores run at the peak frequency.
  - 5y ago

TedShiller 5y ago

DRM?

charcircuit 5y ago

I think it would be cool to just be able to instantly get improvements to my machine without having to go through the hassle of dealing with ordering and installing physical hardware.

tiffanyh 5y ago

People get bent out of shape with Intel doing this yet rave in using an Apple M1 MacBook Pro which is entirely 100% custom / proprietary silicon. HN cracks me up.

detaro 5y ago
"People" also think Apple laptops are stupid and overpriced. HN is not a homogeneous group with a single opinion on every topic, so such "gotcha" arguments make little sense.

phendrenad2 5y ago

People are acting like this is being implemented in consumer CPUs. I don't see any indication of that. This is likely for people who need powerful on-site compute, but can't afford (or don't yet need) the most powerful version of Intel CPUs. This is a way to shave down the price tag, by letting people buy the most powerful CPU, but restricting it down to what you actually need/can afford, so Intel can sell it to you at a subsidized discount.

phendrenad2 5y ago
(Also, upgrading CPUs costs labor, so having the CPU "pre-upgraded" is another cost savings)

fuckchina 5y ago

Time to face the truth, Intel sucks, even their CEO talk like shit[1] [1]: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371659 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371659