Thoughts on software-defined silicon

IN pricing theory, you want to extract the maximum value. If you sell a product at only one price, you are forced to compromise at both ends: there are potential customers who would pay above your marginal price, so are potentially profitable but don't buy because your offered price doesn't meet the value they see in the product, and you leave money on the table from customers who have more value in your product than what you charge; they would have paid more if you asked, but you didn't.

The conventional answer to is create differentiated products at different price points. Intel does this, nothing new. It is commonly accepted that this is something like an happy accident of the variation in how CPUs are made. A comment above says that this is greatly exaggerated but even if not, the distribution of different working cores is not a random accident: it would be a deliberately chosen manufacturing strategy affected by how the production process is configured. I doubt that Intel or AMD is very surprised by the output they get, and I expect they could tweak their production process to avoid nearly all locked cores, although at the cost of lower total output ( I have some manufacturing experience behind that comment, but it think it is not a controversial statement). The difference between accepting binned manufacturing output or achieving the same thing with software seems really invisible to me. I find it ironic that a computer science community is having trouble with the concept of abstracting hardware into software.