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,

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.