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This is a weird concept and I'm trying to figure out how they intend to market it. It seems to me that people buying cpus look for the best performance at the r
by seanalltogether 13y ago
This is a weird concept and I'm trying to figure out how they intend to market it. It seems to me that people buying cpus look for the best performance at the right price, build the machine, and then 3 or 4 years later start the process over again. They won't unlock the cpu right then and there unless it fits within the price range, and they wont do it years later when they're looking to upgrade their rig because they'll haven't forgotten or there will be something much much better.
- Spooky23 13y agoIBM has been doing this for Mainframes and pSeries/RISC boxes for a long time. Other mainframes did this as well. On the pSeries boxes, you buy a base level of CPU cores, and you can buy licenses to unlock additional cores for a period of time. It gives you cloud-ish type features (pay for what you need, when you need it) with on-premise hardware. It was a really common licensing model when "data processing" was all about batch workloads. Now that we're building virtualized scale-out systems versus client/server systems with fixed resource requirements, it's a model that can make sense again. If you think about it, EC2 is another way of accomplishing the same thing.