Thoughts on software-defined silicon [LWN.net]

Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 18, 2022 21:48 UTC (Fri) by MattBBaker (subscriber, #28651)
Parent article: Thoughts on software-defined silicon

IBM has tried this before in the server market. Racks of fully populated machines, and then you would install a license in the BIOS to unlock capabilities. Rumor is that the target of this was Amazon, which needed a way to run their website over Christmas, but not over buy on compute for the rest of the year. Instead, Amazon started AWS and rented out their excess capability.

It seems unlikely Intel is eyeballing "Matt's desktop". It feels like this will be DOA because anyone that Intel would eye up for this would instead go to ARM for custom chips.

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Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 21, 2022 16:20 UTC (Mon) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link]

HPE is doing this today with Greenlake. In order to sell to on-premise customers with a need for variable compute capacity and to prevent them from fleeing to the cloud, they deploy more hardware and let you activate that additional hardware for a fee. I'm not sure how this works on the back-end, if they have worked out a deal with Intel to get unactivated chips for a lower price, or if they just expect that people will buy the extra capacity once they have it. But, this is the kind of thing they could to with activation codes to ensure that the processor couldn't be used without activating it.