TBH, I don't hate the concept of one-time unlocks of features that are significant differentiators but would be a disproportionate cost to distribute to everyon

TBH, I don't hate the concept of one-time unlocks of features that are significant differentiators but would be a disproportionate cost to distribute to everyone. Annual subscription for AVX512? No. Annual subscription for ECC? lolno Paying a one-off to enable ECC on your consumer chip? I prefer AMD's "just have it" approach, but I suspect if the market wants it enough, Intel's approach will rapidly change when people start to want ECC more and go with AMD purchases instead in the markets between "personal system" and "megacorp that just pays for it", so whatever. What'd be really amusing is if the goal is that Intel can sell chips with these features disabled if they were broken, and then send you a replacement gratis if you try to buy the unlock and they go "oh no". That's really the major market value add that I can see Intel getting from this, is being able to have better yields on these by killing rarely-used features and patching over it when someone has a broken part and wants it.