Thoughts on software-defined silicon

I'm surprised at the number of people completely ignoring the very real possibility that the lockout implementation will be heavily flawed; Intel CPUs haven't exactly been faithful to their ISA plans in recent years.

I fully expect within 3-5 years an exploit to surface giving everyone access to all of their CPU features, after which point Intel will lawyer up and play the DRM game. In this scenario private cloud gets a huge advantage; they can move illegal CPUs behind legal nginx servers, while public cloud has to pay the full cost of licensing each CPU. Private consumers don't even come close to mattering, nobody has the legal capacity to just "sue all our customers" (besides, you lose a lot of customers who were on the fence but still buying).