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Their current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push doesn't look like a right move to me.

caslon 5y ago
It's probably the right move financially. People love to pay more for less. Prebuilt desktop, server and cloud companies have built businesses around that concept. The average person is undereducated and easily parted from their money. It's a lot easier to make a bad product that appeals to them and get half the market for free than it is to make a good product and try to appeal to the best.
- kodah 5y ago
  Calling the cloud "less" in terms of return is certainly a take. Writing software in a DC was pretty miserable, managing the systems in a DC while having zero control over provisioning, having to file tickets, sending endless emails, and dealing with single lane DCs with little to no redundancy was particularly miserable. The cloud has a lot of flaws, and I do think we'll end up back in DCs again, but it'll be different this time. Companies will have to have redundant internet providers, they'll have to provide APIs as opposed to helpdesks, they'll have to implement a redundant internal structure that scales well, storage will demand options. All of these things existed before the cloud, but became expectations when the cloud hit the market. That's why a lot of companies moved and I doubt they see it as "less".
  - caslon 5y ago
    Companies are generally stupid, because any group large enough regresses to the median of its members, or worse, the average of its C-Levels. I'm sure they don't consciously see the cloud as less, but that's still the selling point; it's why they value it.
dannyw 5y ago
Like it or not, that's probably where the industry will be in 5 years. You might not like it, but X-as-a-service make way more money for the company, and shareholders. It'll probably look like this: buy a 'cheap' Intel CPU for $99 (say, 4P, 12E cores clocked at 2 GHz), with "Turbo" to 4.5 GHz being a $79/year subscription and "Extreme Turbo Max" to 5.1 GHz being an additional $35/year. First year free, of course, to get you hooked on the 'turbo' speeds. Intel would be able to capture ~97% of those proceeds; instead of having to pay XX% to the distributor and retailer. Would consumers revolt? Some might, but the masses will click 'Buy Now' with a $99 sticker price versus competitor offerings at $400; give it one financial year and AMD's board will force them to follow suit.
- robotnikman 5y ago
  Damn, the future of personal computing gets more depressing every day.
  - echelon 5y ago
    The market economy has discovered this path and is allowing it. - iPhone you can't freely distribute software to (and Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, so we may as well count them in too) - infrastructure giants that turn open source services into paid platforms and then accrete all developer mindshare - thin clients replacing thick clients. Workloads will move from desktop computers to the cloud. No need for a beefy computer to run software locally. More moat for the platforms since tools won't develop for a small market of hobbyists.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, That's BS. My mom installed f-droid by herself and can install apps from APKs without any help. It's not like you gotta root your phone, use ADB, or break out the CLI for that. All you have to do is tap Install when prompted, that's it. OMG, so complex, only 0.01% of users can tap Install in F-droid. /s
      - echelon 5y ago
        Purely anecdotal. It sounds like your mom is pretty tech savvy, though. F-droid is less popular than Unix on the desktop. They don't publish any stats, but as a proxy, their Twitter account only has 10k followers and their forums receive fewer than ten posts a day. Google trends shows "Ubuntu vs f-droid" dwarfing the latter term to the point there's no signal at all. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I was expecting it to be closer.
        ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        Yes, but you were talking about difficulty, not popularity. Those are not even remotely the same things. Just because something is not popular does not automatically make it difficult.
phkahler 5y ago
>> Their current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push doesn't look like a right move to me. That was bothering me a bit too, but then I realized it may have a use that most of us don't care about. Sure they could charge more for AVX512 or whatever, and they might try to charge rent for such options which I'm not a fan of. But what if they are being asked by 3-letter agencies for chips with custom circuitry that would be relatively low volume, somewhat annoying to produce? If it's not too much area they could just add those features to every CPU and only enable them for those agencies via SDSi interface. Just speculation in a direction that is IMHO less awful than excess monetization.
- svnt 5y ago
  This is already a standard practice and wouldn’t require changing their business model.
  - lisper 5y ago
    It also wouldn't require a public announcement.
- danuker 5y ago
  How does it bother you less, assuming that 3-letter agencies can access parts of CPUs that you can't? If anything, it bothers me more! Why would they get special treatment, and why would I have to subsidize its features paying for my CPU to have it, but disabled?
  - exikyut 5y ago
    FWIW, IIUC the binning process that designates chips as Core, Xeon, Pentium etc series ultimately sources parts from a common set of conveyor belts, identifying final designations using QC processes that further subclassify against what parts of a chip do not work correctly. So if say the AVX512 unit in a single core doesn't pass muster an entire die might go in the "doesn't have AVX512" bin and then get marketed appropriately; or perhaps (uncited speculation) a chip that fails the test suite for a Xeon E3 might get rebranded as a Core i3 instead. I do wonder what percentage of this classification process is driven by process yield and how much is driven by volume quota requirements. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is an area of careful optimization; for all I know the entire silicon portfolio just ships the process yield org chart. But all this means the user-facing FLAGS in the chip under the keyboard I'm typing this comment on is the result of a fuse configuration (aka policy), rather than a 1:1 representation of the potential of the photomask, and there are very likely a few micrometers worth of functionality I'll never get to use. Of course I'm very curious if this is because the disabled areas were faulty (optimal use of manufacturing potential) or because *shrug* The Manufacturing Computer needed to meet its quota of Core i5s that day (arguably optimal fulfillment of volume potential). (Then there's the argument of disabling feature X across all cores for consistency, hmph.) But this is all firmly out in the weeds of implementation minutiae, and way beyond reasonable optimization; I have no idea what's theoretically broken in my CPU - and whether re-enabling that functionality explicitly to torture-test stuff I might like to make resilient would present me a relevant surface area of functionality I even knew what to do with (haven't yet played with C intrinsics for example). At the end of the day, disabling functionality on-chip seems to be one of the few viable ways to claw fabrication yield back to something commercially viable and not utterly eye-watering, and IIUC it's been a staple for a long time. Rereading your comment I realize it's quite possible you were writing with some or all of the above context implied and I may have misread. Not sure, disregard if so.
cma 5y ago
For nvidia, in the datacenter, they made all the features of most cards a service you can't buy, and it paid off big for them.
barkingcat 5y ago
Wouldn't that be exactly the right thing to do if you want to minimize physical sku's and maximize sales? as far as the user is concerned, if they put deactivated silicon on a chip, and can hit the power envelope targets, then it's like it wasn't there at all...
- eptcyka 5y ago
  They can produce more chips from the same wafer if they just produce smaller chips. I think doing this is stupid in the long run.
jvanderbot 5y ago
OK, I get the worry around software-enabled CPU features. I really do. But what evidence do we have that Intel is pushing it specifically for renting those features out vs price differentiation at purchase time (which has been their model forever)
bee_rider 5y ago
Is it rented or is it just pay-to-permanently-unlock. Paying to permanently unlock a feature might not be so bad. And forcing extensions to justify their price might not be the worst thing. And this might let them get the "nobody is paying for avx-512" signal a little faster than spinning up a billion slightly different SKUs.
- robwwilliams 5y ago
  It would be interesting to rephrase many of these HN comments in the context of a general purpose home robot. Or a Tesla. I take all of this for granted already for Tesla. For a general purpose robot I might want baby sitting one year and health care provider another year.
mrtweetyhack 5y ago

It's probably the right move financially. People love to pay more for less. Prebuilt desktop, server and cloud companies have built businesses around that concept. The average person is undereducated and easily parted from their money. It's a lot easier to make a bad product that appeals to them and get half the market for free than it is to make a good product and try to appeal to the best.

kodah 5y ago
Calling the cloud "less" in terms of return is certainly a take. Writing software in a DC was pretty miserable, managing the systems in a DC while having zero control over provisioning, having to file tickets, sending endless emails, and dealing with single lane DCs with little to no redundancy was particularly miserable. The cloud has a lot of flaws, and I do think we'll end up back in DCs again, but it'll be different this time. Companies will have to have redundant internet providers, they'll have to provide APIs as opposed to helpdesks, they'll have to implement a redundant internal structure that scales well, storage will demand options. All of these things existed before the cloud, but became expectations when the cloud hit the market. That's why a lot of companies moved and I doubt they see it as "less".
- caslon 5y ago
  Companies are generally stupid, because any group large enough regresses to the median of its members, or worse, the average of its C-Levels. I'm sure they don't consciously see the cloud as less, but that's still the selling point; it's why they value it.

dannyw 5y ago

Like it or not, that's probably where the industry will be in 5 years. You might not like it, but X-as-a-service make way more money for the company, and shareholders. It'll probably look like this: buy a 'cheap' Intel CPU for $99 (say, 4P, 12E cores clocked at 2 GHz), with "Turbo" to 4.5 GHz being a $79/year subscription and "Extreme Turbo Max" to 5.1 GHz being an additional $35/year. First year free, of course, to get you hooked on the 'turbo' speeds. Intel would be able to capture ~97% of those proceeds; instead of having to pay XX% to the distributor and retailer. Would consumers revolt? Some might, but the masses will click 'Buy Now' with a $99 sticker price versus competitor offerings at $400; give it one financial year and AMD's board will force them to follow suit.

robotnikman 5y ago
Damn, the future of personal computing gets more depressing every day.
- echelon 5y ago
  The market economy has discovered this path and is allowing it. - iPhone you can't freely distribute software to (and Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, so we may as well count them in too) - infrastructure giants that turn open source services into paid platforms and then accrete all developer mindshare - thin clients replacing thick clients. Workloads will move from desktop computers to the cloud. No need for a beefy computer to run software locally. More moat for the platforms since tools won't develop for a small market of hobbyists.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Android makes it sufficiently difficult that only 0.01% of users can do it, That's BS. My mom installed f-droid by herself and can install apps from APKs without any help. It's not like you gotta root your phone, use ADB, or break out the CLI for that. All you have to do is tap Install when prompted, that's it. OMG, so complex, only 0.01% of users can tap Install in F-droid. /s
    - echelon 5y ago
      Purely anecdotal. It sounds like your mom is pretty tech savvy, though. F-droid is less popular than Unix on the desktop. They don't publish any stats, but as a proxy, their Twitter account only has 10k followers and their forums receive fewer than ten posts a day. Google trends shows "Ubuntu vs f-droid" dwarfing the latter term to the point there's no signal at all. Perhaps that's an unfair comparison, but I was expecting it to be closer.
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        Yes, but you were talking about difficulty, not popularity. Those are not even remotely the same things. Just because something is not popular does not automatically make it difficult.

phkahler 5y ago

>> Their current CPU-features-as-a-service marketing push doesn't look like a right move to me. That was bothering me a bit too, but then I realized it may have a use that most of us don't care about. Sure they could charge more for AVX512 or whatever, and they might try to charge rent for such options which I'm not a fan of. But what if they are being asked by 3-letter agencies for chips with custom circuitry that would be relatively low volume, somewhat annoying to produce? If it's not too much area they could just add those features to every CPU and only enable them for those agencies via SDSi interface. Just speculation in a direction that is IMHO less awful than excess monetization.

svnt 5y ago
This is already a standard practice and wouldn’t require changing their business model.
- lisper 5y ago
  It also wouldn't require a public announcement.
danuker 5y ago
How does it bother you less, assuming that 3-letter agencies can access parts of CPUs that you can't? If anything, it bothers me more! Why would they get special treatment, and why would I have to subsidize its features paying for my CPU to have it, but disabled?
- exikyut 5y ago
  FWIW, IIUC the binning process that designates chips as Core, Xeon, Pentium etc series ultimately sources parts from a common set of conveyor belts, identifying final designations using QC processes that further subclassify against what parts of a chip do not work correctly. So if say the AVX512 unit in a single core doesn't pass muster an entire die might go in the "doesn't have AVX512" bin and then get marketed appropriately; or perhaps (uncited speculation) a chip that fails the test suite for a Xeon E3 might get rebranded as a Core i3 instead. I do wonder what percentage of this classification process is driven by process yield and how much is driven by volume quota requirements. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is an area of careful optimization; for all I know the entire silicon portfolio just ships the process yield org chart. But all this means the user-facing FLAGS in the chip under the keyboard I'm typing this comment on is the result of a fuse configuration (aka policy), rather than a 1:1 representation of the potential of the photomask, and there are very likely a few micrometers worth of functionality I'll never get to use. Of course I'm very curious if this is because the disabled areas were faulty (optimal use of manufacturing potential) or because *shrug* The Manufacturing Computer needed to meet its quota of Core i5s that day (arguably optimal fulfillment of volume potential). (Then there's the argument of disabling feature X across all cores for consistency, hmph.) But this is all firmly out in the weeds of implementation minutiae, and way beyond reasonable optimization; I have no idea what's theoretically broken in my CPU - and whether re-enabling that functionality explicitly to torture-test stuff I might like to make resilient would present me a relevant surface area of functionality I even knew what to do with (haven't yet played with C intrinsics for example). At the end of the day, disabling functionality on-chip seems to be one of the few viable ways to claw fabrication yield back to something commercially viable and not utterly eye-watering, and IIUC it's been a staple for a long time. Rereading your comment I realize it's quite possible you were writing with some or all of the above context implied and I may have misread. Not sure, disregard if so.

cma 5y ago

For nvidia, in the datacenter, they made all the features of most cards a service you can't buy, and it paid off big for them.

barkingcat 5y ago

Wouldn't that be exactly the right thing to do if you want to minimize physical sku's and maximize sales? as far as the user is concerned, if they put deactivated silicon on a chip, and can hit the power envelope targets, then it's like it wasn't there at all...

eptcyka 5y ago
They can produce more chips from the same wafer if they just produce smaller chips. I think doing this is stupid in the long run.

jvanderbot 5y ago

OK, I get the worry around software-enabled CPU features. I really do. But what evidence do we have that Intel is pushing it specifically for renting those features out vs price differentiation at purchase time (which has been their model forever)

bee_rider 5y ago

Is it rented or is it just pay-to-permanently-unlock. Paying to permanently unlock a feature might not be so bad. And forcing extensions to justify their price might not be the worst thing. And this might let them get the "nobody is paying for avx-512" signal a little faster than spinning up a billion slightly different SKUs.

robwwilliams 5y ago
It would be interesting to rephrase many of these HN comments in the context of a general purpose home robot. Or a Tesla. I take all of this for granted already for Tesla. For a general purpose robot I might want baby sitting one year and health care provider another year.

mrtweetyhack 5y ago