Thoughts on software-defined silicon
SDSi is a "feature" that is expected to make an appearance in upcoming Intel processors. Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise. As the enabling patch set from David Box makes clear, the interface to the mechanism itself is relatively simple. It appears as a device on the bus that offers a couple of operations: install an "authentication key certificate" or a "capability activation payload". The certificate is used to authenticate any requests to enable features, while the payload contains the requests themselves. Unless this device has been used to store an acceptable certificate and payload, the features that it governs will be unavailable to software running on that CPU.
The SDSi hardware also maintains a couple of counters that track the number of unsuccessful attempts that have been made to load a certificate or enable a feature. Should either counter exceed a threshold, the mechanism will be disabled entirely; the only way to get it back will be to power-cycle the processor. Presumably, the intent here is to thwart attempted brute-force attacks against the SDSi gatekeeper.
Intel is clear enough about the purpose behind this new mechanism. SDSi will enable shipping CPUs with features that may be of interest to users, but which are unavailable unless additional payments are made. The restricted capabilities will be present on all shipped CPUs, but the customers, who might have thought that they own their expensive processors, will not be able to use their systems to their fullest capability without add-on (and perhaps recurring) payments to the vendor.
The benefits to Intel are clear. The company can do price differentiation among its customers in an attempt to extract the maximum revenue from each while simultaneously reducing the number of different hardware products it must carry in its catalog. The revenue stream from a processor will not necessarily stop once the CPU is purchased, and might continue indefinitely. The benefit for customers is not quite so clear. In theory, customers with minimal needs can avoid paying for expensive features they don't use and can "upgrade" their hardware without downtime if their needs change.
Also unclear is which features Intel intends to control in this manner. One can imagine all kinds of things, including the ability to access larger amounts of memory, higher clock rates, additional CPUs, specialized instructions, or accelerators for workloads like machine learning. Taken to its extreme (which the company would presumably not do, though one never knows anymore), an off-the-shelf processor might be unable to run anything more demanding than "hello world" until additional licenses have been purchased. There was a time when a floating-point processor was an add-on unit; perhaps we will find ourselves there again.
This business model is not new, of course; stories abound regarding early mainframes that could be "upgraded" by altering a single jumper. Tesla automobiles include a number of features, including basic capabilities like use of the full capacity of the battery, that only work if an extra payment is made; there is no shortage of reports that the company will disable those features when one of its cars is resold. Car manufacturers evidently want to extend this idea to, for example, requiring subscription payments to enable heated seats. The heating elements exist in the seats regardless, and the manufacturer sold them to the buyer, but the buyer still does not really own them.
Rent-based business models have been spreading through the technology industry for some time. Many of us no longer purchase and run our own servers; we rent them from a cloud provider (and, to the tell the truth, are often better off for it). Companies that are still in the proprietary software business are finding the monthly subscription model more appealing than simply selling software licenses. And, of course, there are dodgy web sites out there demanding payments for access to their content.
But the problem seems worse for hardware that has been purchased, and which the customer, on the theory that they own said hardware, may believe they can rightly use to its fullest capability. Our free software, which is supposed to enable that use, finds itself relegated to asking the hardware for permission to use the available features. It is a loss of control over our systems, yet another set of secrets hidden away inside our computing hardware and protected by anti-circumvention laws; if this approach is commercially successful, we will surely see much more of it.
It is hard to see a way out of this situation that doesn't involve making hardware free in the same way that we have done with software. Maybe someday it will be possible to order the fabrication of processors from free designs and at least be able to hope that the result will be lacking in deliberate antifeatures. But that is not the world we live in now, and it's not clear that we will get there anytime soon.
Meanwhile, SDSi is definitely coming to Linux; maintainer Hans de Goede has indicated
that this work is on track to be merged for 5.18. There are not a whole
lot of arguments that can be made against the acceptance of the SDSi
driver; it simply enables another piece of functionality packaged with
upcoming CPUs. The kernel community has not made a practice of judging
whether it likes the "features" provided by a specific peripheral before
accepting driver support, and it would be hard to justify starting now. So
the Linux kernel will play along with SDSi-enabled CPUs just fine; it will
be up to customers to decide whether they want to be as agreeable.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 17:53 UTC (Fri)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link] (17 responses)
Posted Feb 18, 2022 18:29 UTC (Fri)
by MatejLach (guest, #84942)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Feb 18, 2022 18:32 UTC (Fri)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
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Posted Feb 18, 2022 18:52 UTC (Fri)
by tshow (subscriber, #6411)
[Link] (11 responses)
Posted Feb 18, 2022 19:24 UTC (Fri)
by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
[Link] (2 responses)
However, I think it's much more likely to work these days, especially in the enterprise space. Processors there are already highly segmented, with dozens of SKUs that only differ in what fuses are blown in them in the factory. In that sense, this can be a real benefit for enterprise customers, as they would presumably need to order and stock fewer CPU variants.
Of course the catch is that longer term, while there is an upper limit to the amount of segmented SKUs are feasible to produce, there is no such limit for feature toggles.
Posted Feb 23, 2022 22:57 UTC (Wed)
by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
[Link] (1 responses)
The reason for this is because defects happen (semiconductor chip joke for free, right there). If you have a problem in a redundant part of you chip, you can close it off and sell the rest of the perfectly good chip at a lower price point. Or lower the clockspeed, whatever.
Interestingly, this is the opposite: it had _better_ have passed qual, but now it is walled off until the customer pays up.
> can be a real benefit for enterprise customers, as they would presumably need to order and stock fewer CPU variants.
On inventory: presumably this will need to be locked to the exact processor. (Or how else do you prevent copying the cert and enabling the functionality on _another_ chip? Maybe phone home? Contact a flex_lm install on your network?) So now you have to track the certs for your chip in _addition_ to the chip itself! Alternately, maybe it stays once enabled sweet, now you have to track the _variants_ of the same chip.
I don't see the upside honestly.
Posted Feb 23, 2022 23:52 UTC (Wed)
by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
[Link]
As I pointed out elsewhere, the degree to which this happens is greatly overstated by semiconductor companies. True, not every chip is going to reach the full clock speed and have all cores working. But for one, especially on mature nodes, the majority of them do and also that doesn't apply for many other lines they already segment along like maximum memory capacity, ECC, software features like Ryzen PRO/vPro etc. The far majority of chips are cut down because they wouldn't sell at a higher price, not because they are defective in any meaningful way. They do this because relatively speaking, the individual chips are dirt cheap (tens of dollars), all of the cost is in the NRE.
> So now you have to track the certs for your chip in _addition_ to the chip itself! Alternately, maybe it stays once enabled sweet, now you have to track the _variants_ of the same chip.
It is generally rare for a cpu to leave a system after it gets put in and tracking per-device licenses already needs to be done for all of the other hardware like switches, BMCs, etc. so it's not really a lot of extra effort for them.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 19:35 UTC (Fri)
by developer122 (guest, #152928)
[Link] (5 responses)
My NAS runs on one of the cheapest (and most power efficient) CPUs AMD ever made, but it's fully stacked with ECC RAM for my ZFS ARC.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 9:20 UTC (Sat)
by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Mar 2, 2022 18:50 UTC (Wed)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 2, 2022 20:39 UTC (Wed)
by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
[Link]
But, my, how prices for this kind of stuff have shot up over the last few years...
Posted Feb 22, 2022 17:48 UTC (Tue)
by IgorTorrente (guest, #156538)
[Link] (1 responses)
Which ECC Ram kit are you using?
Posted Mar 2, 2022 18:53 UTC (Wed)
by anton (subscriber, #25547)
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Posted Feb 19, 2022 3:35 UTC (Sat)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
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Posted Feb 19, 2022 10:16 UTC (Sat)
by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
[Link]
The pessimist in me thinks that this is just wishful thinking, though.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 13:37 UTC (Sat)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link] (2 responses)
And even if everyone in the community refused to add it Intel would just add the patch to its own kernel and require use of this kernel. Like Nvidia does for its own hardware.
Free software means adding antifeatures to a fork is cheap (especially if they are self-contained).
Posted Feb 19, 2022 22:52 UTC (Sat)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 24, 2022 10:39 UTC (Thu)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
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Posted Feb 18, 2022 18:46 UTC (Fri)
by tshow (subscriber, #6411)
[Link] (8 responses)
I could kind of see the justification for this if it was running the hardware harder and making it more likely to fail within the warranty period, if (for example) they charged to let you dangerously overclock but would still honor the warranty. But this does look like another "The money people are asking where else can we extract rent?" situation.
Now, if you could pay them to get root access to the IME so you could properly secure the machine, that would be another thing entirely.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 18:59 UTC (Fri)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link]
This is available to some customers, but not the general public. Some folks have done a lot of work to try to neutralize it:
Posted Feb 19, 2022 12:48 UTC (Sat)
by hazeii (guest, #82286)
[Link]
Posted Feb 22, 2022 1:28 UTC (Tue)
by klossner (subscriber, #30046)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Feb 22, 2022 9:46 UTC (Tue)
by geert (subscriber, #98403)
[Link] (3 responses)
Software-defined silicon is like renting the first two floors in a 10-story office building which is otherwise vacant: if you pay more, you get access to more floors; if you don't, the other floors stay unused. But the other floors have been constructed anyway, and thus have already consumed (scarce) resources.
Posted Feb 25, 2022 17:02 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link] (2 responses)
And that's why the the owner doesn't make you pay for all 10 stories if you don't need them.
And the only reason he doesn't go ahead and let you use the other 8 anyway is that locking you out of them is the only way he can know you're telling the truth when you say you're willing to pay for only 2 stories. Charging people for all the stories they're willing to pay for minimizes the price per story for everyone.
Posted Feb 25, 2022 18:58 UTC (Fri)
by geert (subscriber, #98403)
[Link]
The "10-story" processor still requires more raw material (silicon + whatever else for doping, etching, interconnects, ...). Plus, you can fit more "2 story" processors on the same wafer, so there's a processing cost, too.
Posted Feb 25, 2022 19:06 UTC (Fri)
by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
[Link]
The difference being that it's not a crime to pick or drill out some locks in your own building to access the upper floors. If you were actually renting the building (CPU) that would be a different matter. (And, of course, that the software locks in question are considerably more difficult to either pick or disable than, say, the lock on your average bank vault, much less a normal high-rise.)
Posted Feb 27, 2022 3:07 UTC (Sun)
by eean (subscriber, #50420)
[Link]
yeah the Tesla battery thing actually might make sense since not fully charging the battery is better for its longevity and one presumes/hopes that as the battery ages unused cells can be cycled in as others wear out. so you're basically paying extra to optimize for range instead of longevity.
Hard to imagine Intel having something analogous to this though.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 20:20 UTC (Fri)
by tux3 (subscriber, #101245)
[Link] (3 responses)
If we can't keep selling meaningful upgrades, phasing in a subscription model early seems optimal.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 21:00 UTC (Fri)
by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
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Posted Feb 21, 2022 4:20 UTC (Mon)
by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836)
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Posted Feb 21, 2022 12:38 UTC (Mon)
by BirAdam (guest, #132170)
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Posted Feb 18, 2022 20:40 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (29 responses)
Intel's been famous for crippling CPUs and chipsets via firmware and microcode lockouts ever since they introduced HyperThreading. The only thing they're doing differently here is dumping the implementation burden on the OS and using the existing ucode cryptography circuitry to remove the right to repair entirely. Maybe they're feeling threatened by coreboot?
The other thing they're doing - unintentionally - is admitting that their chips are barely worth what the base model sells for and everything else is pure scalping. That too is public knowledge but it's nice to see it straight from the horse's mouth.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 22:56 UTC (Fri)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (27 responses)
> The other thing they're doing - unintentionally - is admitting that their chips are barely worth what the base model sells for and everything else is pure scalping.
It is possible (I haven't run the numbers) that they are running an "airfare-style" business model, where:
1. The cheap seats barely break even on a seat-mile basis, and may even lose money when non-operating expenses are included.
If the airline had the option to do so, they would fill the entire plane with business class seats. But they can't sell quite enough business class seats, at business class prices, for this to make sense, unless they use smaller planes, which have poorer economies of scale, driving the price further up, etc. The purpose of the economy seats, then, is to lose as little money as possible, and *maybe* make a small profit if the economics allow for it. The people sitting in business class are the folks who are actually paying for the plane ride, despite the fact that their seats are only marginally more costly to the airline in terms of operating expenses.*
The question is whether the economies of scale inherent in the silicon market end up working out the same way as they do in the aviation market. I would be very interested in seeing hard data on that point.
* In a properly-run business, opportunity costs should usually be low or negative. Positive opportunity costs indicate misallocation of resources. So if you want to quantify the "cost" of a good or service to the supplier, you probably mean the accounting cost, not the opportunity cost.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 23:48 UTC (Fri)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (24 responses)
This was very much the case up to about 5 years ago in case of Intel on servers.
These days? It just seems stupid.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 2:00 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (23 responses)
Nope. You are forgetting an elephant in the room: price of set of photolithography masks and design cost for these masks. To make one set of masks you have to spend millions of dollars (singular millions). But to develop completely new set price can go to $100 million for relatively small chips and I wouldn't be surprised to know that with monsters like AMD/nVidia/Intel are producing they can go to $1 billion or more. When non-recurring costs are so high it may make sense to produce transistors which are destined to be disabled and it would still be cheaper than to produce many physically different SKUs. Nope. As price of development grows higher and higher and relative cost of unused silicone lower and lower more and more companies would want to do that. That's simple math. I don't know under what kind of rock you were sitting, but just recall that endless disable/enable AVX512 saga: apparently it's cheaper for Intel to go with already prepared masks and just disable AVX512 in firmware rather then redo the production process!
Posted Feb 19, 2022 8:47 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (11 responses)
Cheers,
Posted Feb 19, 2022 11:41 UTC (Sat)
by smurf (subscriber, #17840)
[Link] (9 responses)
Selling perfectly working CPUs at a bargain and then charge for the "upgrade" is a slightly different kettle of fish, and frankly I can't contribute much to that discussion beyond "don't like it and will go to some pains not to use CPUs with this kind of anti-feature".
The non-turnoff-able IME is bad enough.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 12:15 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (8 responses)
Except it wasn't broken. The majority of sold chips had perfectly functional additional cores you can enable (back when all it took to enable them was a pencil).
And I'm sure the majority of Ryzen 5 5600X sold today actually have 8 working cores, too. They have fully functional 32MB cache designed for all 4 cores and if your approach was the reason for their existence then we would have had some version of Ryzen with reduced cache and all 8 cores enabled. There are nothing like that because it doesn't make any economic sense: you couldn't fit these between Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X. They would be weird side-cousin to Ryzen 5 5600X which would just make buyers confused. It's exactly the same only now you couldn't sell small percent of chips which are actually defective. But have less SKUs to manage. I'm not sure if it would work or not, but it makes perfect economic sense. Yeah, that's what stops these incentives. PR backlash. But as R&D prices for CPUs go up and prices of unused silicone goes down the incentive to switch to that model becomes more and more acute. Actually the problems with Dark silicon almost guarantee that said model would become the norm eventually. When you couldn't power all the transistors on the chip simultaneously for thermal reason the ability to pick between features A, B, and C (either of which can be enabled but not all simultaneously) make such scheme pretty attractive. You couldn't do that with millions of SKUs but can easily achieve with million of [potential] licenses. And in that case the ability to enable features without license would become actively harmful: enabling all features simultaneously would just fry the chip and it would be pretty hard to prove in warranty service that this happened because of customer irresponsibility, not because of customer's misuse.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 12:58 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
50-series Pr1mes actually came with a microcode update if you were running INFORMATION (aka Pick) on them, it added a whole bunch of instructions specially optimised for handling strings, to make the database more efficient.
THAT would be an interesting feature on modern silicon :-)
Cheers,
Posted Feb 26, 2022 5:17 UTC (Sat)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:06 UTC (Sat)
by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966)
[Link] (3 responses)
Surely this case could be handled in hardware by only accepting configurations enabling at most any 2 of features A, B, C (or whatever other thermal / power constraints exist). I don't see why this would require a license based system to be safe
Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:10 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
This would only work if you can, somehow, determine which combinations are actually safe and which may do harm based solely on some simple calculations. If you need to do any kind of testing, then license would be perfect way to ensure that everything works perfectly. That's minor issue, ultimately. Economic need to differentiate markets drives the effort to a much larger degree than technical needs.
Posted Feb 20, 2022 10:20 UTC (Sun)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (1 responses)
The point is, you can decouple the technical aspect from the economic aspect, at least to some extent. Locked hardware exists because it is economically favored for it to exist. You can't "solve" the "problem" of locked hardware; it is not a technical problem in the first place. As long as those economic incentives continue to exist, it is inevitable that Intel, and other chip manufacturers, will produce and sell locked hardware.
Posted Feb 20, 2022 12:00 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Yes, but you can go in the other direction: use solution designed to solve economic problem to solve technical problem, too. True, but they would use technical need to keep hardware from breaking as justification for what they are doing.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 1:06 UTC (Mon)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link]
Yes, but... modern chips have been past this point for at least a decade. It wasn't solved with a licensing system: it was solved by having power management circuitry on the CPU that adjusted things (usually the operating frequency and voltage, but it is perfectly possible to imagine it also adjusting semi-invisible microarchitectural features like the number of execution ports) such that your code would keep running, just slower. Boost mode etc is the same thing: the fewer cores busy, the faster they're run, and even with lots of cores busy you can run fast briefly until the power management system turns down the CPU frequency to keep things cool enough. This is obviously *vastly* more efficient and flexible than some clunky licensing system would be: it allows for dynamic adjustment, which is something no licensing system like this could ever handle.
No, this is all about getting to make one SKU and sell it as several and allow upselling lower models to higher without needing hardware replacement. Shame that doing so requires cryptographic locks in the chip. (I doubt that anticircumvention measures are meaningful here: modern CPUs are almost impossible to analyze at the level you'd need to to crack this open anyway, or people would already have extracted much more significant private keys for firmware signing etc. Nobody has.)
Posted Feb 21, 2022 9:01 UTC (Mon)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
This problem has already been solved and it has not been solved by turning off features:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Turbo_Boost
Posted Feb 26, 2022 5:09 UTC (Sat)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
I had one of those too. Stable as a rock with the extra core enabled for 12 years now, and it could even handle overclocking on top of that. The weird BIOS dance to unlock it put me off ever trying to run Coreboot on the thing though.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 9:12 UTC (Sat)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (10 responses)
Sure. But this works only if you don't have competition. Because it's easy to undercut others on features otherwise. After all, it doesn't cost you anything extra to enable a feature that your competitor doesn't have.
We're already seeing this with AMD, it's steadily eating into Intel's server marketshare that had been unassailable up until ~3 years ago: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-amd-4q-2021-2022-...
Posted Feb 19, 2022 11:57 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (9 responses)
If you have competition then it becomes even more important. It would cost you a lot. If you would stop selling $299 Ryzen 5 5600X (which is, essentially, $449 Ryzen 7 5800X with two cores disabled) and would start selling Ryzen 7 5800X for $399 instead of having these two… you would lose both on people who were ready to spend $449 and on ones who were ready to buy something for $299. I took example from AMD book, not Intel book to show that as competition grows more acute the need to disable features and sell crippled product grows, not diminishes. Market segmentation is powerful tool. When AMD had no ability to make powerful CPUs (for many years AMD's CPU before Ryzen were awful) — because it was hard to sell even CPUs with even all features enabled (and it was losing money as the result). When AMD made something for the top tier — it started marked segmentation games (and immediately become profitable). And this has nothing to do with the fact that AMD presented 7nm EPYC Rome two years ago while Intel still couldn't make 10nm Xeons (10nm of Intel is more-or-less the same as 7nm of TSMC), but everything to do with the fact that EPYCs are less segmented? Dream on.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:11 UTC (Sat)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:19 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
If we have lived in a world where every CPU can be sold then we would have seen similar craziness to GPU market where prices are 2x-3x recommended price. And GPU makers don't, actually, embrace that craziness, they fear it because they know what comes next: governments would say that cryptocurrency mining is a criminal activity, GPU sales would drop through the floor and they would be selling them at loss for some time. Fab capacity is strained not because it's impossible to build mode fabs, but because it's impossible to do that profitably: build cycles are many years, investment are measured in billions and unused fabs are not aging well. Thus no, your reasoning doesn't make sense long-term. And CPU/GPU manufacturing is long-term process, it takes many years to develop CPU from scratch and year or two just to do minor alterations.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 16:10 UTC (Sat)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link] (1 responses)
The GPU and CPU makers are all bidding on the same fab capacity. When AMD reserves wafers at TSMC, that's capacity that is denied to Apple/Nvidia/Intel/etc. and vice versa.
The ability to build new fabs is not unlimited. Bleeding edge fabs need equipment from ASML who reports that they and their supply chain are already maxed out. The world is essentially already building new fab capacity at the maximum rate they can get lithography equipment.
The rumors are that TSMC is booked out *years* in advance at the 5, 4, and 3nm nodes. Are you arguing that AMD is going to produce 128core zen4s and then cripple perfect dies down to 16c core parts instead of taping out multiple designs that use the exact same logical blocks, when all that lost real estate could have instead been used for GPUs or ~5-7 additional CPUs?
Posted Feb 19, 2022 17:12 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
That's nice piece of data. Let's try to decipher it, shell we? Doesn't look like shortage of CPUs to me, sorry. Indeed, you don't know that. When you need to pay 10x or 100x price to receive 250nm chip (like some automotive chips are selling for right now) and situation stays that way for years — then you can say there are shortage of chips. Till then it's normal reaction of market on changes in demand and supply for something that takes years to produce coupled with customers who, naïvely, expect to buy the same thing with lead times measured in weeks. JIT-manufacturing, both good and bad sides of it. Why do you say these are rumors? That's the reality. Latest nodes are always booked years in advance. Because fabs are extremely expensive yet they can only ask for extra-premium prices for latest nodes for a few years… nobody builds spares. You don't even need rumors to confirm something that was always true. Nope. That's not true because of, as you have said yourself: fab capacities are booked years in advance. Essentially they are booked when labs are built or maybe a bit later. If they are already booked then there are no competition between customers. No, they just build more fabs. No, I'm saying that if you don't want shortages you don't disrupt markets by printing trillions of unbacked money and using all tricks you can imagine to avoid 40-50% inflation… mechanism where you have to calculate number of chips you need to order five years in advance but where buyers expect lead times measured in weeks works if you can predict number of buyers, but if you break that mechanism… it stops working. This is completely unrelated to selling crippling CPUs. Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 9 5900 are still being produced and sold despite the fact that you can sell the exact same chips as Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 9 5990X. Turning 128 core chip into 16 core chip wouldn't make any sense because AMD embraces chiplets architecture thus you can just use more or less chiplets. But if you want to shave off 2 cores or 4 cores... AMD does that and is happy to sell these at discount prices.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 19:07 UTC (Sat)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (4 responses)
Except that you can undercut Intel and sell Ryzen 7 5800X for $299 and immediately crush Intel. Otherwise Intel will just push you out with cheaper and faster CPUs.
In reality, cores are usually locked because they fail internal QA - this is indeed a perfectly valid strategy.
> I took example from AMD book, not Intel book to show that as competition grows more acute the need to disable features and sell crippled product grows, not diminishes. Market segmentation is powerful tool.
Not following. Once the competition starts biting, there's a pressure to unlock more and more features on the low-end of the spectrum.
Posted Feb 20, 2022 0:40 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
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. 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. 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.
Posted Feb 20, 2022 0:44 UTC (Sun)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link]
Why would you want to crush Intel in the lower-end market segment where (per the economy seat analogy) their profit margin is approximately zero? The production cost of your 8-core chip will be similar to their 8-core-with-2-perfectly-good-ones-disabled chip, so you'll make no profit either. And now you can't do any market segmentation yourself, because you're already selling your most powerful chip for no profit. That seems much worse than copying Intel's segmentation strategy and getting a small share of high-margin segments.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 4:35 UTC (Mon)
by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836)
[Link] (1 responses)
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.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 13:40 UTC (Mon)
by gnb (subscriber, #5132)
[Link]
Posted Feb 20, 2022 0:36 UTC (Sun)
by Thomas (subscriber, #39963)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2022 3:12 UTC (Mon)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link]
Breaking news: "premium" products yield higher margins. You've described how pretty much every industry works. The reason SUVs cost more that minivans in the USA right now is not because they cost more to manufacture, it's only because more people want SUVs more, etc.
What is special here is the frustration to hold something physical in your hand and owning only _part_ of it. For some curious psychological reason it feels _more_ frustrating than owning _none_ of it (like for instance: when some device is unusable without some cloud subscription)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 8:24 UTC (Sat)
by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
[Link]
Posted Feb 18, 2022 20:50 UTC (Fri)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Feb 18, 2022 21:12 UTC (Fri)
by developer122 (guest, #152928)
[Link]
Posted Feb 19, 2022 1:58 UTC (Sat)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 9:36 UTC (Sat)
by developer122 (guest, #152928)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 11:32 UTC (Sat)
by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
[Link]
Posted Feb 19, 2022 13:29 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Intel overestimated the speed of changes in the software realm. Alder Lake have some cores which support AVX512 and some that don't support it yet. I guess the optimistic thinking was that software would adopt, somehow. But software was barely able to adopt cores with different speed, neither Linux nor Windows is ready to deal with cores with different instructions sets! Thus it was easier for Intel to disable it rather then try to create some buggy driver which would do something with that mess.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:33 UTC (Sat)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link]
Posted Feb 18, 2022 21:06 UTC (Fri)
by wittenberg (subscriber, #4473)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 18, 2022 22:45 UTC (Fri)
by ejr (subscriber, #51652)
[Link]
Doubling down, this is about ensuring cloud providers negotiate appropriate fees. Unless competitors undercut these fees.
So it's a temporary thing. Intel won by nuking these constraints once upon a time.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 21:48 UTC (Fri)
by MattBBaker (guest, #28651)
[Link] (1 responses)
It seems unlikely Intel is eyeballing "Matt's desktop". It feels like this will be DOA because anyone that Intel would eye up for this would instead go to ARM for custom chips.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 16:20 UTC (Mon)
by jhhaller (guest, #56103)
[Link]
Posted Feb 18, 2022 21:59 UTC (Fri)
by kunitz (subscriber, #3965)
[Link] (6 responses)
There are a number of details that will be interesting to understand. Those certificates must be specific for a CPU; you don't want customers to run a whole fleet with a single feature certificate. What will be the lifetime for the root certificate? Can it be exchanged? If not this is an interesting mechanism for implementing planned obsolescence.
I can understand why Intel is doing it. Right now they have to blow off fuses to generate different SKUs. In the future they have one SKU but can still do price segmentation.
Posted Feb 18, 2022 22:59 UTC (Fri)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 13:45 UTC (Sat)
by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 15:36 UTC (Sat)
by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 19, 2022 23:33 UTC (Sat)
by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
[Link]
1. AMD could not adjust it's wafer allocations to the shortages easily, as TSMC fab capacity has to be booked far in advance. Intel is far more flexible there.
2. More importantly, unlike Intel, AMD shares silicon between server and desktop processors. Since Server CPUs have far higher margins, this means they are going to prioritize those when push comes to shove as it did last year. In such an environment it makes little sense to launch an SKU for every price point as they usually would.
Posted Feb 20, 2022 17:13 UTC (Sun)
by willy (subscriber, #9762)
[Link] (1 responses)
A 500 MHz 1.5 MB cache with on-chip CPU
(there are various free copies of the pdf floating around the net; you don't need to pay for it)
You probably also want to consider what percentage of the die is L3 cache; over 90% on the high end models with a hundred MB of L3 cache.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 4:54 UTC (Mon)
by willy (subscriber, #9762)
[Link]
https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/File:Isscc_cache...
Slide 20 is where they start talking about the yield improvement features.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 3:40 UTC (Sat)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link] (1 responses)
I'm not really a fan of rentier models, but I think the technical problems that will come are enough to make this a bad idea.
Sure there are examples of doing this in the mainframe era, but mainframes were not living in our modern world of security attacks. Additionally, the pricetags and dev cycles of those systems meant that a lot more attention was given to the implementations at least in an attention / complexity ratio sense.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 9:34 UTC (Mon)
by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
[Link]
Also, do you really think people somehow make fewer mistakes just because they are designing hardware instead of writing software?
Posted Feb 19, 2022 6:51 UTC (Sat)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link]
Posted Feb 19, 2022 7:26 UTC (Sat)
by mcon147 (subscriber, #56569)
[Link]
Posted Feb 19, 2022 8:14 UTC (Sat)
by gioele (subscriber, #61675)
[Link] (2 responses)
[1] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/
Posted Feb 19, 2022 18:01 UTC (Sat)
by ermo (subscriber, #86690)
[Link] (1 responses)
Was it because the IP for the hardware blocks in question was owned by someone else than the SoC supplier (MPEG LA vs. Broadcom) in this instance and that, due to wanting to keep the BoM as low as possible to hit the intended RPi price point, this was necessary for the RPi foundation?
Or am I getting it all backwards?
Posted Feb 19, 2022 18:24 UTC (Sat)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link]
> One of the things that we had to regretfully dismiss as an option was an MPEG-2 decode licence for every unit. Providing that licence would have raised the price of every Raspberry Pi by roughly 10%
> We’ve spent some months working out how on earth to square this particular circle. A blanket licence for everybody would cost the Foundation money it simply doesn’t have, and not everybody with a Raspberry Pi would use that licence; an individual licence for an individual user to download and use with an individual machine is a surprisingly finickity thing to engineer. [...] But that’s what we’ve done
(They already paid a blanket licence fee for H.264 decode/encode, so that was enabled by default.)
I don't believe the individual licence key is used by the hardware blocks in any way; it's merely verified by the Pi's proprietary firmware before enabling the APIs that make the hardware accessible from Linux. Some naughty people hacked the firmware so the verification function would always return true - it's not particularly secure, but it was apparently good enough to keep the MPEG LA happy.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 13:53 UTC (Sat)
by b3nt0box (subscriber, #98698)
[Link]
I think that is the area where this is intended to play. Large systems installations where the hardware is never actually "owned" but leased.
Posted Feb 19, 2022 14:50 UTC (Sat)
by jeffreypmcateer (guest, #140200)
[Link]
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).
Posted Feb 19, 2022 16:04 UTC (Sat)
by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 20, 2022 15:35 UTC (Sun)
by Tobu (subscriber, #24111)
[Link]
Posted Feb 20, 2022 11:47 UTC (Sun)
by jengelh (guest, #33263)
[Link]
With dedicated machines, you get all the features. If a higher-value component is inserted, you get to keep the benefit. Think of storage: it fails, and models go out of production, and the hoster's warehouse may be out of stock on a particular historic item. Having a 500GB SSD replaced with a 512GB model comes to mind.
Posted Feb 21, 2022 10:35 UTC (Mon)
by eliezert (subscriber, #35757)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2022 12:04 UTC (Mon)
by bblacksr (guest, #83377)
[Link]
Posted Feb 21, 2022 23:31 UTC (Mon)
by mr_bean (subscriber, #5398)
[Link] (2 responses)
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
Posted Feb 23, 2022 4:28 UTC (Wed)
by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Feb 23, 2022 8:38 UTC (Wed)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link]
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.
Posted Feb 23, 2022 13:50 UTC (Wed)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link]
I see what you did there :)
Posted Feb 23, 2022 22:34 UTC (Wed)
by Trelane (subscriber, #56877)
[Link]
Unfortunately, this isn't Software Defined Silicon so much as Software _Deleted_ Silicon.
Posted Feb 24, 2022 18:51 UTC (Thu)
by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)
[Link]
However, it seems that, if we are unhappy with the risks of remote entities (public or private sector) being able to decide that we don't need to be operating anymore, that this looks like a tremendous threat vector.
Which invites the question of what open chip manufacturers exist that Linux can target.
Posted Mar 1, 2022 12:55 UTC (Tue)
by bblacksr (guest, #83377)
[Link]
Posted May 23, 2022 8:00 UTC (Mon)
by littoral (guest, #140523)
[Link] (2 responses)
It follows that the best defense is to make sure that AMD remains a viable competitor.
Posted May 23, 2022 8:33 UTC (Mon)
by jem (subscriber, #24231)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't think we should be worried about Intel being a monopoly. To me it seems like they are gradually becoming the underdog, with AMD being competitive again. Apple has also proved that it is possible to make Arm processors that are competitive in general purpose computing, and with increasing distrust between China and the US, I wouldn't be surprised by a flood of powerful Chinese RISC V chips on the market in the coming years.
Posted Jun 7, 2022 18:52 UTC (Tue)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Intel's customer isn't you as an individual. These things are laundered through the retail and system-builder industry, and those middlemen are under no obligation to be clear or honest about this DRM if it'll make them an extra buck.
The Apple situation just reinforces that: they *do* advertise and sell direct to end users, so they aren't going to intentionally build lemons and cut corners simply because they don't have the responsibility-laundering arrangements in place to get away with that.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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AMD efficient ECC
Asus and Asrock mainboards, and some Gigabyte ones support ECC on AM4 boards. AFAIK all CPUs are good except the non-Pro APUs. We have a Ryzen 1600X, 1800X, several 3900X, and a 5800X all working with ECC.
AMD efficient ECC
AMD efficient ECC
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
We use whatever is available at a good price. In our 5800X box we use 4 Kingston KSM32ED8/32ME.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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If improvements keep slowing down, it will eventually be cheaper for you to software-upgrade your i3 into an i5 than buy the 5% better and newer i3s that come out every year or two.
This'd be great for Intel, who is now in the business of selling people upgrades while saving the cost of an entire chip.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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2. The business class seats are the main profit center, because you can sell a fair number of them to business travelers at a healthy markup, and make a decent profit in doing so.
3. The first class seats are essentially "bonus profit" for customers willing to pay extra for premium services. Some airlines don't even do first class, or merge it with business class.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
> So the fact that you can just sell the fully-loaded die as an "economy" SKU means that you don't have competitors that would just undercut you on price or features.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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Wol
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> That makes economic sense when the silicon is broken, and already routinely used with clock speeds or (in the embedded realm) on-die Flash memory.
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Wol
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> You can't "solve" the "problem" of locked hardware; it is not a technical problem in the first place.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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> And in that case the ability to enable features without license would become actively harmful: enabling all features simultaneously would just fry the chip
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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> But this works only if you don't have competition.
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> I was just quoted a 26+ week lead time on any zen3 epyc cpu with >= 32cores from a major manufacturer. I ended up accepting zen2 cores in order to cut the estimated lead time in half.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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> Except that you can undercut Intel and sell Ryzen 7 5800X for $299 and immediately crush Intel.
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the name of this "feature" is appalling
the name of this "feature" is appalling
the name of this "feature" is appalling
the name of this "feature" is appalling
the name of this "feature" is appalling
the name of this "feature" is appalling
the name of this "feature" is appalling
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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[2] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/vc-1-license-key/
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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The activation trigger could be something like a CPU identifier wrapped in a signature from a key Intel controls, because why wouldn't they.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
sometimes it's just a sale/negotiatin tactic
On every cycle of the HW, what would eventually happen, is that all vendors who integrate the HW got the company to agree to include "100% attach rate" as part of the cost.
So there weren't really any certs installed by end users, it was (in my opinion) just something sales people can give as part of the negotiation tactics.
I recently looked at a product that includes such HW and to this day it lists these features as optional and enabled by a certificate even though it comes pre-installed and as a user I did not pay anything additional for it.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
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Coupling
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
This kind of ripoff - pioneered, I believe, by IBM in the 1970s when it had an effective monopoly on certain kinds of peripherals - only works when a company has a monopoly. In a free, perfectly competitive market, the price of a product will be the cost of producing and delivering it, plus the reasonable profit margin that the manufacturer needs to stay in business.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
Thoughts on software-defined silicon
