It’s worse than just the licensing. They’re exposed as PCI devices, so they don’t automatically show up in VMs, they don’t access user memory in a particularly

It’s worse than just the licensing. They’re exposed as PCI devices, so they don’t automatically show up in VMs, they don’t access user memory in a particularly pleasant manner, they aren’t automatically usable in unprivileged programs, etc. And this destroys 99% (maybe 99.99%) of the actual economic value for Intel! What Intel needs is for people to integrate these accelerators into software the way that AVX is integrated into software. Then software and libraries can advertise things like “decompression is 7x faster on Intel CPUs that support such-and-such”, and then customers will ask for Intel CPUs. And customers will ask their providers to please make sure they support such-and-such feature, etc. But instead we have utterly inscrutable feature matrices, weird licensing conditions, and a near-complete lack of these features on development machines, and it’s no wonder that no one uses the features.