Intel's Pay-As-You-Go CPU Feature Gets Launch Window (tomshardware.com) 180
Intel's mysterious Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) mechanism for adding features to Xeon CPUs will be officially supported in Linux 5.18, the next major release of the operating system. Tom's Hardware reports: SDSi allows users to add features to their CPU after they've already purchased it. Formal SDSi support means that the technology is coming to Intel's Xeon processors that will be released rather shortly, implying Sapphire Rapids will be the first CPUs with SDSi. Intel started to roll out Linux patches to enable its SDSi functionality in the OS last September. By now, several sets of patches have been released and it looks like they will be added to Linux 5.18, which is due this Spring. Hans de Goede, a long-time Linux developer who works at Red Hat on a wide array of hardware enablement related projects, claims that SDSi will land in Linux 5.18 if no problems emerge, reports Phoronix. "Assuming no major issues are found, the plan definitely is to get this in before the 5.18 merge window," said de Goede.
Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn't disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don't know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. [...]
Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a mechanism for activating additional silicon features in already produced and deployed server CPUs using the software. While formal support for the functionality is coming to Linux 5.18 and is set to be available this spring, Intel hasn't disclosed what exactly it plans to enable using its pay-as-you-go CPU upgrade model. We don't know how it works and what it enables, but we can make some educated guesses. [...]
And who want this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And who want this (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that's basically my question - why would *anyone* even consider buying into the scheme?
Re:And who want this (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who bough mini computers, like the IBM AS/400s. I think those were all sold like that. The idea is buy an entry level and if your business grows you can upgrade without a hardware swap. This was for transactional stuff that you needed to scale up, not out.
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I don't recall the AS400 being software upgradeable like that. The big iron yes as it was easier to ship a standard config and then switch on via a maintenance call when the customer ponied up.
AS400 was sold on the principle that you could replace with more powerful computers in the line constantly without having to change or rebuild any of your applications or data.,
Re: And who want this (Score:5, Informative)
It is almost common knowledge among tech professionals that almost all chips are manufactured at the max config. If the largest chip is a 28-core 30Mb of cache config, that is the template for all the chips on the wafer. It is cheaper to do photolithography that way. Defects are detected once the wafer gets put into a package, and bad cores are disabled, and bad blocks of L1,2 &3 caches are also disabled. The remaining functional portions are sold as lower-end configs and the yield is boosted. Some chips are probably healthy and have their core counts adjusted for demand-at-price point reasons. If your quality is really high, not everyone is willing to shell out the $7k for the top of the line Xeon. But, they may want them turned on later >:D
Re: And who want this (Score:3)
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In this case, Intel will require most of the yield to be of the higher range CPUs, so that they can intentionally disabled working components and reenable them in the future.
So if the yield is not that great, they may have a problem.
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Some CPU's are already sold intentionally degraded. Sometimes the chip maker needs to shift more volume of a lower tier part rather than absolute margin and intentionally disables features to sell to that market. Often there is not as many defects as you may think, especially on a mature process.
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The second the way for upgrading gets cracked?
The person buying the cheapest CPU and ending up with the best.
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Lots of people have been doing this for decades - with FPGAs.
Intel bought Altera and is now integrating their FPGAs into Intel CPUs. An FPGA is basically a programmable circuit on a chip - you can create a system out of various building blocks like logic gates, registers, counters and more complex parts like PLLs for frequency control, and entire CPU cores.
Altera, and now Intel, licences some of those blocks. If you want a complete, well tested HDMI interface on your FPGA, you just throw Intel some cash to
Re:And who want this (Score:4, Funny)
Intel bought Altera and is now integrating their FPGAs into Intel CPUs.
That was my first thought when I saw this story. Intel bought Altera for a reason, and this is their revenue model.
AMD wants to acquire Xilinx for the same reason.
Will you be able to load your own open source code onto it?
Most likely you will be able to run your own code but you will have to use Intel's toolchain to compile.
you need their proprietary software.
For Christmas, I bought my son a little Cyclone-4 FPGA board from Amazon and figured we could have some fun programming it. It uses a 330-kilobit config file, so simple, right? Then we tried to download the Quartus toolchain from Intel: It was a 28 GIGAbyte download. . It is the single most bloated piece of software I have ever seen in my life.
Re:And who want this (Score:4, Insightful)
Quartus is the software embodiment of pain. It's as if it's designed to suck.
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Eh, I don't think this will be particularly linked with FPGA, that's a bit orthogonal. The chip will have the capabities, but just won't use them. For example, the processors already throttle themselves if they measure themselves as using over a certain wattage, one could imagine that mechanism only letting you use 35W of the processor, and then paying to have that mechanism soft reconfigure itself. Or the memory controller may omit slots or limit address range to have less memory. None of these are FPG
Re:And who want this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And who want this (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And who want this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: And who want this (Score:2)
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If they can afford to sell a CPU with disabled features for less money and still make a profit, they basically are price gouging by asking for more to enable the 'features.'
Not necessarily. They could reduce their production costs significantly, if they only had to make one chip design and could then use it in multiple applications. It would also save in supply chain and inventory costs. They would certainly save money on design costs and similar onetime expenses. Without knowing what the features and prices involved are, it is impossible to know.
Re:And who want this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: And who want this (Score:2)
No, not all attempts to make a profit are price gouging. Intel needs to make some profit, and the best way to do that, while supplying the whole market is to be able to charge some people less, and others more for different levels of capability.
intel also had $$$ raid keys when AMD did not (Score:2)
intel also had $$$ raid keys when AMD did not may that an $$$ add on.
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Nope - it leaves them with a bunch of sub-functional silicon dies which they can no-longer simply sell as the next cheaper model because someone might want to upgrade and activate some of the dead cores.
Re: And who want this (Score:2)
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And who want this feature?
I do. Can't wait until it gets cracked and I can buy a fully-featured processor for the price of an entry-level one.
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Can't wait until it gets cracked
I would bring sandwiches and warm blankets to that vigil; don't count on it _ever_ being cracked. People have been trying to break into the Management Engine for years and it still remains a largely obscure gray box. We still don't even know exactly how Intel does microcode, but we know it's hard to write your own: "With the Pentium there are two layers of encryption and the precise details explicitly not documented by Intel, instead being only known to fewer than ten employ
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feature?
Anyone who wants a cheaper device and doesn't want to pay for something they don't use.
It's hilarious that Slashdot is such a strong supporter of modularity and customisability, but as soon as they are literally sold selective features you have a cry.
screw that (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw you Intel. I'll buy AMD. If you can afford to put it on the silicon then you can afford to sell it to me now at a reasonable price. This is nothing but a money grab. I'm upgrading to another brand for less.
Re: screw that (Score:2)
This doesn't sound like a feature intended for regular consumers, most likely business customers, and even then probably not somebody buying servers for their own business. It's probably intended for companies that sell some kind of datacenter appliance, and might not necessarily need every feature on their platform.
Still though, that model of selling hardware and only allowing you to use all of it if you pay extra is incredibly annoying. It's really dumb when you have say a 24 port fiber channel switch, an
Re:screw that (Score:5, Informative)
Re:screw that (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a fan of artificial scarcity.
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So they should only sell max config parts? So if you require 4 cores, but they only make 8 core chips, you would be happy paying for stuff you don't want or need? Not too smart.
Re:screw that (Score:4, Insightful)
They can afford to make an 8 core CPU and sell it for a 4 core price - and, given that most purchases are price-sensitive, the majority of them will be sold at the 4 core price.
Selling the exact same CPU for a 4 core price and for an 8 core price is completely different from having two different CPUs with different features selling at different prices. It's a con job, it's a rip off. It's ripping off both those who paid the 4 core price (who could have got more for the same money) and those who paid the 8 core price (who could have got the same thing for less money).
This is an anti-feature that only makes sense from Intel's point-of-view, their desire for artificial market segmentation.
I hope their crypto keys or whatever they use get leaked. fuck 'em. they deserve to crash and burn for anti-consumer anti-features like this.
And the Linux kernel shouldn't be supporting or enabling this. The kernel devs may or may not legally be able to add code which enables all features of software-crippled hardware like this, but they're certainly under no obligation to support Intel's consumer-hostile business model. IMO, they have a moral obligation to ensure that bullshit like this fails in the market, even if only by refusing to help these kinds of products be competitive with products from vendors who don't do this shit.
Re:screw that (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm guessing, but I think the Linux changes are for it to be able to deal with stuff changing while it is running that used to not change except when you rebooted. For instance the number of CPUs can change. For some work we do it would be nice to at least turn hyperthreading on/off on the fly rather than rebooting to do that.
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> It's a con job
No, it isn't. If Intel only makes (for example) 8 core chips and charges the price for 8 cores, they price most people out of the market. They need a way to charge people who need 8 cores for 8 cores and provide the rest of the market a lower-price chip. By making the change in software instead of physical hardware, they can create the lower-price chips at an even lower cost than they could with different wafers. It's a win for both Intel and consumers to be able to do this kind
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The problem is that your understanding of what 'they can afford' is WAY off. You only count the 'manufacturing' cost, and completely ignore the 'development' cost, which can be far higher.
Suppose you spend $250 million dollars designing an 8-core chip, and it costs you $100 to manufacture each chip. You expect to sell 8 million cores over the life of the product. How much must you charge for each chip? Well, if you are only selling 8-core chips, the cost is (250,000,000 / (8,000,000 / 8)) + 100, or $350
Re:screw that (Score:5, Informative)
You sell the un-crippled 8-core chip for the price you were planning to sell the 4 core chip for, or slightly more. You'll still make a profit. It's not like you were actually selling them at a loss - that would be crazy because the market for the lower-priced chip is much larger than the market for the more expensive chip, and will be even larger if buyers can get 8 cores for the roughly same price as it will be an obviously better deal for those who were hesitating.
Stop shilling for corporations. Intel is not your friend, their interests are NOT your interests. Enabling their scams and artificial market segmentation ripoffs doesn't help you at all (unless you're paid to come onto sites like slashdot and bullshit for them).
Because you no longer own the hardware you bought. This business model can only work if it's illegal - e.g. via DMCA - for users to do whatever they want with their hardware, including enabling disabled cores that Intel doesn't want them to. If your use of a product you bought is controlled or restricted after sale by the manufacturer, you don't own it, they do. You bought it, but they still own it.
The buyer is now a renter. And it won't be long before this kind of CPU licensing doesn't just affect how many cores they're allowed to use, they'll soon be expected to pay monthly or yearly rent to keep on using the product they bought. Intel's plan is just the first step, to get customers used to the idea of paying more for something they already bought. The games industry will look like amateurs with their DLC and loot boxes, compared to Intel.
You can see for yourself how this brain-washing works because you are already a victim of it - you seem to believe that it's OK for manufacturers to use hardware fuses to cripple their products so that they can sell the same product at different prices to different people. Switching from hardware fuses to software is the obvious and natural extension to that...and you're already primed for it because you think the hardware fuses idea was acceptable. It wasn't, and still isn't.
And once Intel demonstrates that customers are dumb enough to fall for it, AMD, Nvidia, ARM, and all the rest will follow.
This is anti-consumer. It's also rent-seeking, anti- free-market behaviour. Remember that before corporate propaganda redefined it to suit corporate needs, "free market" meant a market free from economic rents, not a market free from regulation.
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Someone else replied and I want to expand upon what they said. Enthusiasts, and specific types of professionals, will buy the high end parts. However, most people will want to buy the low end. If you remove your low end option, a few might buy the high end part. However, most would just go to another company. They need the high end SKUs for the profit margin to drive R
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> However, most would just go to another company.
Or buy fewer chips or possibly be priced out of the market entirely. If Intel just sells all the 8-core chips at a 4-core price, they don't make enough money back to cover their R&D costs.
Re:screw that (Score:4, Interesting)
Corporations may believe it their god-given right to be wasteful and produce garbage that won't last >2 years, but that is not acceptable.
Intel's new software unlocking is literally the opposite of that. It encourages continued use of the existing CPU instead of purchasing another. I fully understand why people don't like the idea of software unlocking CPUs. My whole point is that Intel (and AMD) are already artificially crippling CPUs, and have been for decades. The new program just lets you buy back the features instead of having to buy a new CPU. The problem is purely a matter of perception. It draws attention to an existing industry practice, and honestly a practice that exists in other industries as well.
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I recently switched from a Xeon machine to an AMD Threadripper and I gotta say... it's a much better all around experience and more bang for the buck as well. I couldn't be happier, and I can't think of a good reason to ever buy Intel again after all their 'security' patches reduced my render machines efficiency by 15-35%.
Intel has lost their way, they really have.
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Well, it's to help reign in the number of configurations of chips out there.
Most designs are only a single die, with fuses that determine what works and what is disabled and testing helps determine what parts go where.
But there are designs like the Xeon where there are options most people don't need, but you might need a feature here and there. Perhaps you only need 2TB of RAM, do you want to pay to support 4.5TB? (Doing so requires more motherboard support for the extra RAM slots, too, so you're paying mor
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They are selling it at a reasonable price. You pay for features, they are optimising their production facilities. It's a cash grab that directly benefits *you* by not having to pay for things you don't use while reducing cost through expanded economies of scale.
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Where only Intel gets to benefit from economies of scale. Economies of scale should drive the price down, not keep the low end the same and make a higher top end.
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'Should drive the price down' - compared to what? If you compare it to the cost of having multiple chip designs, multiple production lines, etc, it absolutely DOES drive the price down.
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Where only Intel gets to benefit from economies of scale.
Oh fucking horseshit. The CPU market is a competitive market meaning that the benefits get passed to you directly. You're deluding yourself if you think that CPUs are artificially highly priced. The reality is they are operating on razor thin margins when the supply isn't upset.
This has been standard practice used to drive down the cost of CPUs for decades. Common silicon with varying performance, price and features. The only thing new is that Intel CPUs aren't hardcoding the software lock, or requiring you
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I don't see it as a discount program.
Re:screw that (Score:4, Interesting)
If you have purchased any CPU/GPU from any manufacturer that was less than the max config in the line, there are two possibilities: it had defective parts, or it was intentionally crippled. The only difference with this is that you can upgrade later without having to repurchase stuff you already paid for.
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Making and selling GPUs with different hardware and different designs (e.g. 3060 vs 3080) at different prices is fine. They're not the same product.
Selling GPUs with the same design at different prices because they are running at a different speed or with some processing units disabled is also fine when testing of the chips shows that they have defects which justify it. i.e. "binning" based on test results. It's better than throwing away an entire chip because it's not perfect.
Even selling the same chips
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Selling the exact thing to different customers at different prices is what airlines do with seats. This is different -- this is selling capabilities a la carte. It isn't the same chip because it isn't running the same software. It's very different than artificially segmenting the market (again, airlines).
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You're right - except imagine paying a subscription to boot your computer. And, as the earlier replier stated, it's a good and should behave like one.
Imagine losing heated car seats [forbes.com] because your subscription lapsed.
Companies are now seeking rents for goods and that is not a good thing - it indicates greed has the upper hand.
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So instead of buying two chips, just buy the one with all the features turned on. I don't understand why you find this so difficult to understand. It obviously saves Intel money. You, on the other hand, are paying the same...well, actually it is probably more expensive for you to buy two chips because then you need the infrastructure to support two,
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It is you that seems to have a problem understanding. They don't disable part of the silicon on EVERY chip, they disable it for people who don't want or need that part. Them offering an 8-core chip cut down to 4 cores at a lower price for people who only want 4 cores does not prevent you from purchasing the 8 core version. Why do YOU find this so difficult to understand?
Intel producing 2 of the same chip has a FAR different (i.e. much lower) cost than producing 1 of two DIFFERENT chips.
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What do you call it when you purchased a 4 core chip and now your needs change and you need 8 cores and the only option is to buy another chip? Waste.
If the "4 core chip" actually had eight cores and you were artificially deprived of half of them to begin with, then *that* is the waste.
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It lowers the cost of production because you only have to design one chip, make one set of masks, etc, run one production line, have one set of tests, etc. All those things cost far more than the actual piece of silicon.
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Re:screw that (Score:4, Insightful)
This whole marketing strategy is repulsive. It's one thing to sell software at an arbitrary price. But hardware is something physical, you either own it or you don't. If they were to lease it I'd be okayish with the scheme, but not if you buy it.
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And once again, you are completely ignoring the costs of development, setting up the production lines, etc. These are the EXPENSIVE parts. If all you are concerned about is the 'hardware', then just go buy a piece of silicon, it will be much cheaper than buying a processor from Intel. If you want that piece of silicon to do something useful in your computer, then you must pay someone to do that. THAT is what you are purchasing.
Epyc (Score:2)
Isn't Epyc already knocking the crap out of Intel in general purpose server situations? Do they think this is going to help?
Please support Open Source Hardware (Score:3)
Bilkware is bullshit.
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What is bilkware about economies of scale reducing cost to consumers?
and how will they stop an free bypass with open (Score:4, Insightful)
and how will they stop an free bypass with open source code?
or is the keys done in the non open source EFI / bios
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Only Intel knows how these parts work, and so far nobody has managed to reverse engineer them. There are no free compilers for Intel FPGAs, they are black boxes that accept a configuration bitstream that nobody understands well enough to generate themselves.
Obligatory... (Score:4)
Expect to see this everywhere (Score:5, Interesting)
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Tesla are already doing this.
So artificial scarcity? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I urgently want that. No, really, I like being fucked over by my hardware vendor!
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Artificial scarcity is an application of economies of scale. You're not being fucked over, someone is literally offering you something for less.
You're more than welcome to pay full price if you want.
It is *-ist to own things (Score:2)
All your "things" are on rent and licensed to you on a monthly basis. Assuming you have adequate social credits, on-time payments, and haven't been canceled. What? You didn't read the EULA?
Already the practice in Tech (Score:4, Insightful)
How is this any different than the old Exchange Server "Cal" licenses? You owned the hardware, but still had to pay Microsoft per user, even though they didn't do anything more to earn it.
Or, Enterprise networking equipment. But a 24 port router or switch, but if your license is for 12 ports, only 12 work.
Or, Tesla cars coming with a bigger battery bank, but you can only use what you paid for or "upgrade" to.
This has been standard practice for years to pay more to use features of devices you already own in certain tech sectors.
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Why does it have to be different in order to be newsworthy?
Intel's done this before with celerons... (Score:2)
Intel have put features such as clock speed and extra cache behind software locks before, but in the low-end consumer space:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Clearly that received a big fat "up yours" from consumers, but many years later they're trying the same thing with servers. Maybe they'll have better luck this time, maybe not!
Brocade Ports On Demand (Score:2)
Brocade switches have had something like this for years. You can buy a switch "base license" which only has certain ports enabled such as the 1G copper ports. You can then purchase a license to unlock the 10G ports that are already on the switch.
Like the opposite of spectre... (Score:3)
Where they gave us patches that took away features for free. Yay!
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Where they gave us patches that took away features for free.
Not for free, they are literally giving you a discount. Did you not pay for the logical reasoning module in your brain?
Not that I like it, but Xenix did it way back when (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that I like it, but this goes back pretty far.
I was the first person in the US to sell non-academic licenses of Xenix/UNIX v7, in 1980.
It didn't come from Microsoft, it was developed by HCR out of Toronto and we were the 1st OEM.
Mostly, it was just s/UNIX/Xenix/g to the standard PDP11 Version 7 UNIX distribution.
That Xenix was built for the PDP 11/23 and was login limited to 4,8,16, or 32 users.
There was a field patch to change the limit, but we never sold one in the sort time we
were selling before the guy running it stole all the money and the company went away.
Gangsters (Score:2)
Actually, I think I want this (Score:5, Interesting)
I administer remote systems. If I could buy a lower end Xeon core for lower end prices and then remotely upgrade it if required... I would totally buy that.
Perversely for Intel, I'd probably despec machines to go cheaper, no need for the CPU headroom if I can trivially upgrade it later.
My first reflex was to be hugely opposed. But honestly, I think I would want this.
Intel bought Altera (Score:2)
You don't need to be a genius to guess this will be a FPGA attached to the CPU, so you can e.g. reconfigure it as a hardware cryptography coprocessor, a hardware protocol decoder, etc. as you need (and if you get access to the corresponding bitfile and the method to upload it).
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No, it will not be an FPGA. They're WAY too slow, and too expensive for that kind of work.
As mentioned by several comments above, it will be cores and cache which is normally physically disconnected to create lower end chips which instead is software disconnected and can be reconnected.
Crippleware (Score:2)
Thin end of the wedge? (Score:2)
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Why are these commits even being accepted? (Score:2)
Hans de Goede (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, just to be clear I'm speaking on behalf of myself here, IOW I am not speaking for my employer.
I must say that I'm not happy to see my name prominently tied to SDSi as is done in this article and in various other articles on the web, suggesting that I somehow endorse SDSi.
The Linux kernel code for this basically builds a communication path allowing a program running in userspace to talk to a new SDSi part of the Intel "Vendor Specific Extended Capabilities" (VSEC) PCI device nothing more and nothing less.
As the Linux kernel subsystem-maintainer for x86 platform drivers reviewing the driver for this new VSEC function falls up on me. This does not mean that I endorse this feature!
This simply means that if there are no technical reasons to not merge it that I will merge it, which is just part of the standard hardware enablement work done all over the kernel.
This really is no different from the kernel also having support for things like HDCP, which does not mean that the folks working on that endorse Digital Rights Management.
âoeEnabledâ (Score:2)
Next System... (Score:2)
Reminiscing the 486SX (Score:2)
I remember being annoyed in my early teenage years upon learning that the initial i486SX had an FPU, but Intel permanently disabled it. You had to buy the more expensive DX model to get the FPU. Or plug in an additional i487 co-processor, which was was basically a DX chip, but unlike normal co-processors, it didn't just perform FPU ops, it disabled the main processor and took over all operations. Anywho, a software upgrade of the original CPU would've made this simpler.
"Boot the computer HAL" (Score:3)
I'm sorry Dave, I cannot do that.
You haven't paid your monthly CPU subscription in a while. You must prepay a full year subscription before I agree to boot.
Feature? (Score:3)
Back in the late eighties, we did a repair on our ordinary washer. My late wife had bought what she could afford, but it didn't have a wash level control (you know, small, medium, large?). We were looking at a repair-it-yourself book, and were shocked.
Then we took off the cover from the control panel... and, sure enough, there was a water level control. For $100 more, the washer would have been sold with another hole in the panel cover and a knob.
We drilled a hole and used a screwdriver to set the level.
And this is different how?
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No. FPGAs are not fast enough for that. This is regular CPU features that just come with a "default off".