Submitted by Intel has officially revealed its Intel On Demand program (opens in new tab) that will activate select accelerators and features of the company’s upcoming Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processor. The new pay-as-you-go program will allow Intel to reduce the number of SKUs it ships while still capitalizing on the technologies it has to offer. Furthermore, its clients will be able to upgrade their machines without replacing actual hardware or offering additional services to their clients.
Intel’s upcoming Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids processors are equipped with various special-purpose accelerators and security technologies that all customers do not need at all times. To offer such end-users additional flexibility regarding investments, Intel will deliver them to buy its CPUs with those capabilities disabled but turn them on if they are needed at some point. The Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) technology will also allow Intel to sell fewer CPU models and then enable its clients or partners to activate certain features if needed (to use them on-prem or offer them as a service).
On the one hand, in a perfect world where people and companies are fair, this seems like a great idea – it allows you to buy one processor (or, in the datacentre case, one batch of processors) and then unlock additional features and capabilities as your needs change. Sadly, the world is not perfect and people and companies are not fair, so this is going be ripe for abuse.
We all know it.
This makes sense, but in a very unintuitive way.
Intel (and other chip companies) don’t actually have separate designs for all the chip models they produce. They usually have only a handful of photomasks for silicon, and use it for many different versions. I was told this is called “binning”.
If the chip is from a good part of the silicon wafer, and comes out with all features working they could sell it as an Core i9. If some cores are not complete, it could be downgraded to Core i7. If iGPU is missing, it becomes a “KF”, etc. Depending on how much cache, hyperthreading, and overall CPU stability at high speeds are out there, there could be 10+ different products coming out of the same design.
This is all good, and optimizes resources, and produces value for everyone.
However companies occasionally disable perfectly working parts to meet up with demand. So your Core i5 might actually have disabled hyperthreading, for no reason other than keeping that market alive.
And that brings us to “licensing” here. Intel can still sell you the chip as Core i5 (I know servers have different codenames), but if you really wanted the extra parts, you can always upgrade.
Now of course this is not ideal. The only reason this is needed is because supply and demand is not working properly here.
(In a perfect world, when chip yields get better, Core i7 should drop to Core i5 prices, and Core i5 removed from shelves. Two months later, this could reverse, and Core i7 might become even more expensive before if that batch was not good. But it is easy to see why this would be really counter-productive. Us humans are not rational animals).
Actually. No. The functionality is there and must work. It’s more about introducing subscription model and for a company to have recurring revenue. Like with software on other people computers. Or like with some cars. The functionality is always there. You just have to pay a (monthly) fee. For being able to access and use it. More control and more (stable) money. This is what the main goal is.
I take this back.
The comment was after reading the summary, but after checking Intel page on this, the situation seems different.
They are selling additional features, like hardware based decoding, or security enclaves as a service. Either one time activation, or “metered” pay-as-you-go system.
Does this make sense? I don’t know. If you are never going to use these features (say you only serve your own code, and never a virtual machine), then not paying for SGX and getting a discount might be enticing. On the other hand, the silicon is there, and Intel already paid for the R&D, so why not enable it? Or will they charge even more extra to those who actually want the feature?
LOL… there is no “discount” just you wait thier prices will go up if anything AND you’ll have to pay more for the extra features.
It reminds me so much of the IBM business model started decades ago with computers including more capacity/features that you can unlock in the field by paying more after sale. Obviously marketing sells this as an advantage “an upgrade is just a phone call away, so convenient!”, but the truth is that customers already paid for 100% of features to be implemented, certified working, and delivered. Now they have to pay more on top of that to activate things.
It’s a form of rent seeking, and in the long run I think we all end up paying more for it, directly or indirectly.
https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/rent-seeking/
We’re all familiar with companies trying to switch away from consumers owning things and towards services where you pay a monthly service fee, think “adobe cloud”. Regular fees typically adds up to more over the lifetime of a product than buying it outright, which obviously is the point. This has started happening with car manufacturers as well, like remotely controlled seat warmers. It’s not consumers pushing for this, but it is consumers who will ultimately face the repercussions of it.
Alfman,
I agree, a subscription only future is very dire.
But having an option to rent instead of buying is usually good for the consumer. Or a subscription option for that matter. Same is true in buying/leasing a car for extended periods, or renting for a vacation, buying/renting/subscribing to video on demand, etc.
But, again, what Adobe does, for example, is reducing choice, and forcing professionals (or even amateurs who care about their photo collection) pay a monthly fee to keep using Photoshop and Lightroom. The older versions unfortunately don’t cut it, because there are new lenses and cameras not in the database, or some really useful features in recent versions. The best I can do is getting a small yearly discount, or a bundle.
I would pretty much prefer to buy an upgrade about every 2-3 years, instead. (It was about $130 for purchase, and is now $80-$120 for a yearly “rental”).
sukru,
I do understand what you are saying, but the thing about rent-seeking is that the goal is for consumers not to have a choice, or to make that choice unpalatable. One can look at housing and think “oh it’s a good thing I have the option to rent because I can’t afford to buy”. While valid at face value, the darker truth is that the very existence of corporations buying up the properties in order to rent them out are very significant contributors to the high cost of housing. People are paying much more on housing than we used even factoring inflation and we don’t have the choice to go back to pre-inflated prices.
I’ll use a purely hypothetical (but hopefully plausible) scenario using CPUs:
So where do you price CPU C? A consumer might expect CPU C to cost $500 initially and another $400 with over the air upgrades, however the business model requires that CPU C get sourced from the same high (ie expensive) bin as CPU B, so pricing CPU C at $500 is out of the question, it has to be higher. Pricing it $900 makes sense because CPUs B and C are the same part, however no sensible consumer is going to by CPU C at $900 instead of CPU B. Because of this and greater dependency on top-tier bins, prices will likely have to go up for CPU B.
New prices…
So now we have prices that are all more or less consistent and we’re creating demand for CPU C with over the air upgrades. These prices “make sense” and could become normalized with consumers paying higher prices for the privilege of being able to upgrade later. Raising overall prices is the only way such a scheme can work, and while it’s nice to provide customers with the option to upgrade, the real price increases are already built in. While “having the option” is a nice selling point, is it a real win for consumers when this is what’s happening behind the scenes?
Alfman,
As above, they already sell good “CPU B” as limited “CPU A” to artificially keep CPU B prices high. If they don’t produce enough defect, they introduce them, so that CPU prices are stable. Anyway, this is another discussion. Because, it turns out the licenses were for “add on” features (uncore), like streaming encryption, etc. Not additional cores.
Housing?
Don’t get me started. As a perpetual renter, I could go on for hours.
But let me say this: people always focus on the wrong stuff. As long as the house supply is below demand, there would be bad actors. And housing supply is artificially kept low, because in the US almost everyone is a “de facto real estate investor”. People’s “net worth” is locked into pieces of concrete, wood, and steel. And “I have mine, you can’t have yours” (NIMBY-ism) is the root of all this.
If, say Bay Area, is lacking 2,000,000 housing units, and we construct 100,000 per year (5% of the demand), of course all of that will be gobbled up by rich people. Even if your provide convoluted mechanisms for poor people to get some of it, it is just a state sponsored lottery where, 95% are still left in the cold.
sukru,
I know. It was a fictitious example to highlight a very specific point: providing more consumer “options” may sound good, but it might not be in real terms once you look under the hood. The numbers in my example are just an illustration but you can substitute lots of products where rent-seeking is taking place: sold as a benefit, but actually a net loss.
You may have gotten yourself started, haha. I’ll let your comment be as is 🙂
Alfman,
Options are good when there are multiple competitors vying for our money.
I recently got a 13700k for example, skipping several generations in between (9900k was the last one). AMD pushing Intel with Ryzen 3 meant Intel had to offer affordable options.
And, yes, of course, if they are a monopoly, or a cartel, all “options” are illusions.
sukru,
I agree having options are good, but I’m wary that good options could get replaced by bad ones.
Under capitalism, the companies that make the most profits are rewarded by gaining market share. and outliving the competition. The capitalistic ideal is for companies to do this by maximizing value for consumers. But the capitalistic reality is that sometimes companies can make more money by pursuing strategies that exploit consumers instead.
For example all the big car companies may end up jumping on the bandwagon of remotely activating car accessories for a monthly charge. Because capitalism rewards companies with the greatest profits, the economic strength and leverage of companies that don’t partake in these practices may become eroded giving way for those practices to become dominant across competitors throughout the industry.
Ostensibly consumers may have many more “options” to choose what features they wish to pay a monthly subscription for, but can still end up in a worse position overall. We may be on the edge of a slippery slope that ultimately snowballs into consumers not having much choice but to pay monthly subscriptions for things that we would have anyway if remote activation wasn’t possible.
Yeah, IBM only makes 1 mainframe model.
As a counter point, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the correct situations.
Integrators can make 1 model, and allow customers to upgrade based on the license. Intel isn’t locking up core functionality, just ancillary accelerators. Looking through the list Quick Assist is the only thing I would want to unlock. They could put SMT and turbo boost behind a license, and I wouldn’t care that much.
Pay-as-you-go would be helpful for devices which don’t need the accelerators 100% of the time. IoT edge devices could unlock the Data streaming accelerator when needed, and the business could save some money if it’s a rare event.
There’s something to be said for not over buying too, and this could prevent some FOMO purchases.
Deadline for some Russian (and or else) hacker to bypass this scheme 3..2..1..
dsmogor,
I imagine these features will get unlocked using a CPU specific certificate saved in the OS. And I’d expect the CPU itself, rather than an operating system component, will be responsible for validating the certificate. So as long as intel doesn’t make a gaffe, it should be quite secure. Even jailbreaks that use hardware mods to control the bus may be infeasible because the CPU security features might be electronically inaccessible from the outside. Still, intel has had serious security weaknesses in the past with features like vPro, so you never know.
Incidentally I successfully converted an Athlon XP into an Athlon MP in the past thanks to the fact that their programming fuses were external to the CPU die. Reprogramming them was trivial.
https://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/articles/view.php?cid=2&id=393&pg=2
I wonder why people tend to imagine how stuff works, while our OS is developed in the open and everything could be checked in the source. In this case, you are mostly right. But very often people imagine things which are in contradiction of reality.
Anyway, the mechanism is simple. It is described, with the link to patches implementing operating system side, in https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/
zdzichu,
Yes people should understand that the interface providing the certificate being open and standardized doesn’t automatically imply that the mechanism validating the certificate in the CPU is corruptible via that interface.
That’s a good link. Apparently there was concern over whether it would be (and should be) compatible with linux. But linux is so popular in the enterprise market that intel is targeting that pay as you go CPUs would be much less relevant without support for linux.
There’s some more documentation here…
https://github.com/intel/intel-sdsi
I was curious about how the CPU would keep persistent state information. Documentation says they’re hey’re using nvram, but that opens up more questions. Like this table here showing “NVRAM_UPDATE_LIMITS”:
It’s common for non-volatile storage to have a limited number of cycles, but what is the lifetime of the NV storage being used in the CPU to support metering? What happens when it is completely used up? Will you be allowed to continue using “metered” features indefinitely despite the fact that the meter ceased counting or are they permanently locked out? I would hope not but it’s not made clear. This may be FUD, but it would suck to find out after warranties expire that you need to replace your CPUs. I’m rather curious what the CPU policy is after 100% provisioned.
I came across this document from 1997. Please look at last paragraph. https://ele.uva.es/~jesman/BigSeti/ftp/Cajon_Desastre/MPR/111204.pdf
Link is missing www. in front.