I cannot coherently state my contempt for this notion of "we sell you shit then charge you rent to use it". May it be pissed upon from a great height by thousands of syphilitic camels.
That said, I wonder what the position of the kernel community will be on including "crack" drivers that unlock these capabilities without the associated payme bullshit?
I believe there's precedent for similar "feature unlock" hardware driver code.
I believe that Intel is smart enough to mix the licence with TPM signature for banning leaked keys.
Now I concur that this trend of "you own something but you are going to pay a rent for it anyway" is starting to get annoying. Even more annoying as it's seems to be the "accepted" new norm. For example with the new Mercedes car where you have to pay a monthly fee to unlock some extra degree of steering angle.
>I cannot coherently state my contempt for this notion...
That's because your contempt is incoherent. Intel is selling consumers optionality. Pay a low price now when you think you don't need a feature and pay more later if you do in fact need it. Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license.
> >pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license.
That's so... Naive? The reality is that the chips will cost the same and Intel will pocket the extra margin. And the rent.
Consumers are already used to pay X for CPU, the price tolerance is already established. What makes you think that Intel will want to cut their profit margins?
While I agree Intel will likely pocket more after this is implemented ever increasing costs seems more like a market problem (i.e. lack of competition or other pressures to incentivize lowering margins for greater total profit due to sales volume) and optimizations like this only make competition easier.
Actually its more I don't care to invest the time at the moment to attempt explaining why I object to the erosion of the very concept of "ownership" whereby we "own" things but some other entity still has legal rights over it and us in our interactions with this physical object.
Flower patents are absurd but this shit is getting nasty.
> Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license.
This is "it's your fault for making me hit you" bully logic.
No one forced them to design multiple variants. If it's already cheaper to manufacture a full-capability chip, they could just distribute that one to all consumers and be done with it. Spending extra effort to put in a complex licensing logic that doesn't do anything else than disable features is pure greed.
Before you owned a nice full-featured i9 proc. You could go on Ebay and sell it for all its power.
Tomorrow, you buy your new shiny basic i10 proc. You then pay extra to unlock the fast multiply for our games, the fast simd for you AI and the upgrade for 4K decoding. After a while, you decide to sell on Ebay. Well your nice shiny software defined features are now worthless. Well not for Intel which has the opportunity to sell the same stuff twice or more.
What would be incoherent is for Intel to not juice this technology even more. Why not have a limited pool of licenses and let people compete for them monthly ?.
The problem is that the boundary of ownership is getting shifted, and by the look of if the consumer will loose.
Hit the nail on the head here. Hardware subscriptions are in a sense just an extension of software subscriptions. I can sell you a shiny new Dell 64-core Xeon workstation, but if you need to run AutoCAD, you'll need a subscription for that. The PC is useless to you without the subscription. If PCs were special-purpose, and you needed to buy a specific PC to run AutoCAD, it would only become more expensive. The fact that you can, at any time, sell that workstation monster to a gamer (who won't pay for the AutoCAD subscription) is part of it's enduring value.
IBM used to lease RAM. Honeywell had a disk drive that was built to support double sided disks but if you flipped the switch yourself, you voided the maintenance contract.
BMW make people pay subscriptions for using onboard entertainment systems.
Why is Intel selling certain parts of its functionality on a lease or optional basis different?
A lease arrangement that is upfront about the terms is one thing. Intel is not leasing these CPUS, just part of them; and "complicating ownership" as i said elsewhere is what im objecting to
Oh look, Intel is going back to the IBM 1960s mainframe model.
How long until they use their management features to sell overnight spare capacity on your machine (using WoL or firmware tricks to power on your machine if you turn it off overnight) unless you pay them monthly?
More likely they suspend/throttle your usage to ensure a given level of services to the people they’re selling extra capacity to.
Maybe make each SKU functionally identical except your software/firmware gate off the extra cores and cache and sell the processing power of the disabled cores unless the owner pays a monthly fee to unlock them.
Didn't they do something similar to this with some of there earlier chips? Like an upgrade from a standard Pentium to a Core based CPU? It din't go over well then either.
I used to work for a manufacturer of mainframes in the 1970s. The installation guys told me about upgrades. They would carry in big sealed crates. They would put paper over any windows in the doors etc. The crates would be opened to reveal food and drinks, books and magazines. They would open up the mainframe and flick the 'double power' or whatever switch, set some tests going and have an enjoyable relaxing day.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 65.8 ms ] threadThat said, I wonder what the position of the kernel community will be on including "crack" drivers that unlock these capabilities without the associated payme bullshit?
I believe there's precedent for similar "feature unlock" hardware driver code.
Now I concur that this trend of "you own something but you are going to pay a rent for it anyway" is starting to get annoying. Even more annoying as it's seems to be the "accepted" new norm. For example with the new Mercedes car where you have to pay a monthly fee to unlock some extra degree of steering angle.
That's because your contempt is incoherent. Intel is selling consumers optionality. Pay a low price now when you think you don't need a feature and pay more later if you do in fact need it. Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license.
That's so... Naive? The reality is that the chips will cost the same and Intel will pocket the extra margin. And the rent.
Consumers are already used to pay X for CPU, the price tolerance is already established. What makes you think that Intel will want to cut their profit margins?
Actually its more I don't care to invest the time at the moment to attempt explaining why I object to the erosion of the very concept of "ownership" whereby we "own" things but some other entity still has legal rights over it and us in our interactions with this physical object.
Flower patents are absurd but this shit is getting nasty.
They already use efuses in a single silicon design to differentiate on product features. How does this new license scheme enable fewer designs?
This is "it's your fault for making me hit you" bully logic.
No one forced them to design multiple variants. If it's already cheaper to manufacture a full-capability chip, they could just distribute that one to all consumers and be done with it. Spending extra effort to put in a complex licensing logic that doesn't do anything else than disable features is pure greed.
Tomorrow, you buy your new shiny basic i10 proc. You then pay extra to unlock the fast multiply for our games, the fast simd for you AI and the upgrade for 4K decoding. After a while, you decide to sell on Ebay. Well your nice shiny software defined features are now worthless. Well not for Intel which has the opportunity to sell the same stuff twice or more.
What would be incoherent is for Intel to not juice this technology even more. Why not have a limited pool of licenses and let people compete for them monthly ?.
The problem is that the boundary of ownership is getting shifted, and by the look of if the consumer will loose.
BMW make people pay subscriptions for using onboard entertainment systems.
Why is Intel selling certain parts of its functionality on a lease or optional basis different?
A lease arrangement that is upfront about the terms is one thing. Intel is not leasing these CPUS, just part of them; and "complicating ownership" as i said elsewhere is what im objecting to
How long until they use their management features to sell overnight spare capacity on your machine (using WoL or firmware tricks to power on your machine if you turn it off overnight) unless you pay them monthly?
Maybe make each SKU functionally identical except your software/firmware gate off the extra cores and cache and sell the processing power of the disabled cores unless the owner pays a monthly fee to unlock them.
Plus ça change.
Do we now need permisions to log into our own CPUs? Log into some web page before CPU starts ? (that internal Minix) :>
Or Internet connection required to be allowed to power on ex-PC ??
Btw. looks like yet another reason to not buy Intel.