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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

by 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.
- mike_d 5y ago
  > cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot You seem to be terribly confused. End customers demand features, they do not demand limitations. AWS and GCP don't want to spend money acquiring or powering chips with dead areas of silicon.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    End customers demand features for a price. If there's unused silicon in a chip, but it costs the same or cheaper and has the features they want, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a customer who's going to complain.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      If it's possible, customers will buy as many of the cheap ones as they can, at the lower price, and aftermarket enable the unused silicon to get a better product, for less money, which may make the business people unhappy. This happened with some GPUs where they could be "upgraded" to be a better product with a soldering iron.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        I'm familiar, I've gotten a few free AMD cores. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urxsySvH-Sdy6liE2EBDaB8b54/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urx... At the end of the day, I don't understand the umbrage at companies segmenting by software instead of hardware. As long as it's obvious what you're getting when you buy, and what you buy lives up to what you were promised, why should I care what it actually is? If the company chooses to look the other way and allow relatively easy unlocks without promising stability, well, that's nice. But nothing I'm owed just because it was physically on the chip. Now on the other hand, if a consumer company switches from a product model to a lease/HaaS model... that's an entirely different can of worms, and they can go to hell.
    - summm 5y ago
      Great. Where can I get a CPU where that stupid Intel ME or AMD crap is just permanently fused off, and even pay less for it?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        Your computer won't boot if they are fused off. They are a necessary component of the CPU.
      - 5y ago
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    "Dark Silicon" is actually ubiquitous in modern chips. They can't possibly run 100% of the chip while staying within power and thermal constraints - and this gets worse, not better as process technology improves. So, even if some of that dark silicon is "software defined" it just doesn't matter all that much.
- rodgerd 5y ago
  Yep. Being able to buy processors that don't trigger Oracle's core-count licensing (for example) but be able to vary cores on and repurpose them in the general VM farm is a thing that I have been very keen on in a past life. It's a relatively niche interest, but it exists.

by temac 5y ago

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.

mike_d 5y ago
> cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot You seem to be terribly confused. End customers demand features, they do not demand limitations. AWS and GCP don't want to spend money acquiring or powering chips with dead areas of silicon.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  End customers demand features for a price. If there's unused silicon in a chip, but it costs the same or cheaper and has the features they want, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a customer who's going to complain.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    If it's possible, customers will buy as many of the cheap ones as they can, at the lower price, and aftermarket enable the unused silicon to get a better product, for less money, which may make the business people unhappy. This happened with some GPUs where they could be "upgraded" to be a better product with a soldering iron.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      I'm familiar, I've gotten a few free AMD cores. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urxsySvH-Sdy6liE2EBDaB8b54/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urx... At the end of the day, I don't understand the umbrage at companies segmenting by software instead of hardware. As long as it's obvious what you're getting when you buy, and what you buy lives up to what you were promised, why should I care what it actually is? If the company chooses to look the other way and allow relatively easy unlocks without promising stability, well, that's nice. But nothing I'm owed just because it was physically on the chip. Now on the other hand, if a consumer company switches from a product model to a lease/HaaS model... that's an entirely different can of worms, and they can go to hell.
  - summm 5y ago
    Great. Where can I get a CPU where that stupid Intel ME or AMD crap is just permanently fused off, and even pay less for it?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      Your computer won't boot if they are fused off. They are a necessary component of the CPU.
    - 5y ago
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "Dark Silicon" is actually ubiquitous in modern chips. They can't possibly run 100% of the chip while staying within power and thermal constraints - and this gets worse, not better as process technology improves. So, even if some of that dark silicon is "software defined" it just doesn't matter all that much.
rodgerd 5y ago
Yep. Being able to buy processors that don't trigger Oracle's core-count licensing (for example) but be able to vary cores on and repurpose them in the general VM farm is a thing that I have been very keen on in a past life. It's a relatively niche interest, but it exists.