Thoughts on software-defined silicon

The optimist in me thinks that this might be targeted only to cloud vendors, who rent a subset of a machine at a time and also might rent the same machine for slightly different instance types. Many instruction set extensions can be hidden from CPUID but would still be present in the processor. Different instance types then could use SDSi to have a different set of features enabled for real, and not just in CPUID.

The pessimist in me thinks that this is just wishful thinking, though.