Thoughts on software-defined silicon
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
Posted Feb 20, 2022 0:40 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Thoughts on software-defined silicon by Cyberax
Parent article: Thoughts on software-defined silicon
> Except that you can undercut Intel and sell Ryzen 7 5800X for $299 and immediately crush Intel.
Seriously? Immediately crush Intel? Weren't you celebrating 25% market share which AMD achieved in four years after introducing CPU which totally kicked Intel's ass?
If you would start selling Ryzen 7 5800X for $299 the only thing you would achieve would be stiffing your own R&D. Which would mean that your next CPU would be worse that CPU of competitors and you would “crush” yourself instead.
> In reality, cores are usually locked because they fail internal QA - this is indeed a perfectly valid strategy.How do you know? We know for a fact from the times when it was possible to enable them that they were perfectly functional back then. We know from sales figures today that it's, most likely, still true today (Ryzen 5 5600X sales are much higher than Ryzen 7 5800X). Nope, these cores are not locked because they fail QA. They are locked to be able to sell CPUs at different price points.
> Once the competition starts biting, there's a pressure to unlock more and more features on the low-end of the spectrum.Where would that pressure come from? It's zero-sum game. We only have two competitors (in mobile space there are more, but still not that many). If you stop offering CPUs at different price points then you wouldn't, suddenly, get more money from selling more CPUs because you couldn't produce more CPUs at the snap of fingers. You pay a lot to ramp up capacity and it happens slowly. If you would deprive yourself from receiving more money they you would just fail to produce enough CPUs, leave money on the table and would lose in the next round of competition.
That's how we ended up with just two manufacturers of x86 CPUs BTW.