Kind of weird pricing. Full lifetime is 3x the yearly price, which seems like a high yearly cost for sure. The full-lifetime pricing feels reasonable I think? C

Kind of weird pricing. Full lifetime is 3x the yearly price, which seems like a high yearly cost for sure. The full-lifetime pricing feels reasonable I think? Comparable-ish to one might pay for a gas-engine upgrade. I'm kind of ok with the $90/mo price. If I want to spend the spring months driving around (yeah would that I have that option these days) & doing trips, like, sure, $180 for some appreciably snappier driving performance could be a fun & reasonable splurge. That said, I've almost never driven a car with >150 hp, only been driven around fast 5 times in my life, so like, I don't actually understand the value proposition of fast cars very much & this might all be nonsense, but there's some sense to me here, & I'm kind of ok with feeding the meter for some extra turbo sometimes. Buying the base unit & having free upgrades sadly makes some sense to me. It's wild that I'm saying this. Part of me definitely looks at this new emerging trend with absolute horror. Intel has a like 8 dimensional matrix of pricing options you can unlock as either (depending on your hardware vendor) "activation" or "consumption" (usage based) "On Demand" server/Xeon chip services. The list of features: Software Guard Extensions/SGX (at 3 price points), Quick Assist Technology/QAT encryption/compression, Dynamic Load Balancer/DLB for telecomm, In Memory Analytics/IMA for data compression again, Data Streaming Accelerator(DSA) for some new direct-memory-access/DMA engine acceleration. Variety of boxes to subscribe to here. Part of me gets it, don't pay for what you don't need, hopefully create some more accessible price points. But also, if you want your chips to win, I just feel like you should be getting the tech out so the world can play with it & figure out it's best uses, and gating a bunch of new features just means a regression from this Democratic software philosophy to authoritarianist & closed, where very few have all the decision making, get to learn & advance the thing/feature and that's that. https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/intel_reveals_paid_xeon_features/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/intel_reveals_paid_xe... Also notably with Intel's new "On Demand" system, not a one of the things you can software enable is - to my knowledge - more clocks/turbo. Yet. Also worth pointing out, we've been here before. Here's Intel doing it in 2010. Software updates that did unlock more cache and HyperThreading for consumer PCs. https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-18-intel-wants-to-charge-50-to-unlock-stuff-your-cpu-can-already-d.html https://www.engadget.com/2010-09-18-intel-wants-to-charge-50... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5819750 On the other end of the spectrum, we are creating more general programmable matter that hopefully people are permitted to find creative use for, real soon. FPGAs were in total doledrums for a while going on where, but there's been a spate of improvements (particularly coming out of Lattice) and there's reason for some hope AMD+Xilinx CPU+FPGAs could legitimately create really fast software reconfigurable accelerators, with whatever the use case demands.