Thoughts on software-defined silicon

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.