Thoughts on software-defined silicon [LWN.net]

Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 21, 2022 23:31 UTC (Mon) by mr_bean (subscriber, #5398)
Parent article: Thoughts on software-defined silicon

I'm possibly alone in not seeing a massive amount of harm in this.

IF I can do the equivalent of buying, say an i5 12600k (currently on sale for about £280 = USD 380) and later upgrade it to an i9 12900K (currently retailing about 2x the 12600k) by just paying the differential in price I've potentially saved on buying a whole new 12900K and having to pass on the 12600K on eBay, or wherever, then I think there is a gain for me as well.

I'm much more worried about e.g. Lenovo using the features in AMD Ryzen chips to lock CPUs to Lenovo boards thus ensuring they have almost zero resale value if one happens to want to upgrade the CPU in a Lenovo PC.

Granted 99.99% of users upgrade at the granularity of "Whole PC" but Lenovo's move seems way more sinister than Intel's

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Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 23, 2022 4:28 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

E-waste is definitely bad and nobody (to within experimental error) really enjoys re-selling parts. The concern is that Intel might decide that you only get to have an i9 if you pay them $5 a month or something, and if you stop paying then it goes back to being an i5. As far as I'm aware, there is no law or regulation which unambiguously says they can't do that.

Thoughts on software-defined silicon

Posted Feb 23, 2022 8:38 UTC (Wed) by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604) [Link]

> E-waste is definitely bad and nobody (to within experimental error) really enjoys re-selling parts.

I'm sure there however are people who enjoy having used kit available at a discount.

> The concern is that Intel might decide that you only get to have an i9 if you pay them $5 a month or something, and if you stop paying then it goes back to being an i5. As far as I'm aware, there is no law or regulation which unambiguously says they can't do that.

Yes and there are a few more things they could do, for example only sell the most basic feature set (single core x86-64) and then sell all the additional capability at a monthly fee structure. And they can decide to on longer rent the features out unless you get a new CPU. Getting downgraded to an i5 may not be so bad, getting downgraded to a 1 core i3 with no turbo probably renders the machine almost unusable and with zero resale value - though at this point you're likely renting / leasing the whole thing anyways which means it's no longer really your computer.