News Intel Finalizes 'Intel on Demand' Pay-As-You-Go Mechanism for CPUs

[Giroro]

Hey, nobody said you should give up any right, do whatever you want.
I'm just saying that intel is also going to do whatever they want, you don't have to buy it, it doesn't have to be your property.

No, Intel can't do anything they want. They are a giant international, publicly-traded company that is bound both to their shareholders and bound by the laws of every country in which they do business, which is nearly every country on earth.

But to your point, it's not that it doesn't have to be my property, it's that hardware built this way definably can't be my property. It can't be anybody's property other than Intel's. Yet, they still are charging for something you can't own. They're pretending to sell it to their customers while retaining complete control and ownership of it.
They're selling a bridge.
It's unnatural. It's inhuman. In basically every non-computer industry in nearly every country it's illegal. It's comparable to blackmail.
If you buy a house from a real estate developer, that developer can't come back and say "we have a copyright on the blueprints to your home, so pay us $5,000 a month or we'll revoke your license to use your garage by burning it down". That's mob tactics.
If we want to have freedom, then we have to be allowed to own things, free and clear. Because people who can't own things are literal slaves. This idea has been well understood for most of civilization.

But lawmakers don't understand these newfangled computer machines. They can't even wrap their minds around what will go wrong if they allow their donors to permanently own naturally-occurring abstract ideas, like colors.

 

[bit_user]

But isn't the target audience for this already used to renting x y z amount of computing power for servers and so on?! This is basically the industry standard, you never know exactly what you will get only that it will correspond to whatever computing power you agreed upon.
These aren't made for us.

Cloud computing is ideally a situation where the tenant can simply move to another provider, if/when the terms & conditions of the cloud operator become hostile or non-competitive.

The key differences here are:

• The operator pays Intel On Demand, not the tenant. Operators that are accustomed to owning their hardware, I believe.
• The operator pays an up-front cost and it becomes expensive to ditch the hardware, if the On Demand pricing becomes excessive.

As for being "made for us":

• Some of us aren't simply gamers, but also use cloud computing or server hardware in personal & professional capacities.
• There's zero guarantee this won't "trickle down" to non-server CPUs. The more successful it is, the harder it will be for Intel to resist extending it across their product lines.
• If it has vulnerabilities and exploits, then it can even affect products which merely have the capability, but ship with perpetual keys pre-installed from the factory.

This is opening Pandora's Box. We simply can't know all that will come of it. I think it was basically a matter of time before it happened, but that doesn't change what a monumental shift it is.

 

[bit_user]

I'm just saying that intel is also going to do whatever they want, you don't have to buy it, it doesn't have to be your property.

And big banks can do whatever they want, like leveraging themselves to the hilt... oh, no they can't!

Where there are societal interests at stake, freedoms of companies to "do whatever they want" can be constrained. Heck, even a private individual's freedoms are restricted by laws, and their interests can be infringed by eminent domain if they're at odds with a compelling societal interest.

 

[bit_user]

If intel wants to get their infinite money forever, which they do, then it has to be able to phone home to authenticate - and it has to remotely install executable code to make it work in the first place.

I'm telling you how their kernel patch actually works. They apparently know they can't require customer CPUs to be online and accessible by them.

...but, go ahead and believe whatever you want.

Intel tried the local install thing about a decade ago. The last time they tried this, it was a massive failure and unrecoverable PR disaster.

We can only speculate about why they're willing to give it another go, but perhaps they think cloud is a sufficiently different market that it's more workable.

I don't think it's any coincidence that Pat Gelsinger had to find a different company to work for, around that time. Now he's back, and now this terrible idea is back.
Interesting coincidence.

Well, the idea to do it again couldn't have originated with him, because the hardware design work would've had to start before he took the reins. That said, it's a business decision whether/when to go ahead with the program, and that's probably something he was involved in.

 

[bit_user]

They're selling a bridge.
It's unnatural. It's inhuman. In basically every non-computer industry in nearly every country it's illegal. It's comparable to blackmail.

In the telecomms industry, there's a term for this: CPE (Customer Premises Equipment), which is a box owned by the provider that sits on the customer's property. I'm sure Intel would like us to believe they're analogous, but I tend to agree with you that a computer is something you buy that Intel has no compelling need to retain control over. Whereas CPE is a practical necessity of how telco providers need to manage their network, and a telco link is inherently a service that has an intrinsic subscription characteristic.

I think arguments like "unnatural and inhuman" won't get very far. I would focus more on the practical dangers and implications of this model, if I were pursuing a legal case against it. Fortunately, I'm not a lawyer.

If you buy a house from a real estate developer, that developer can't come back and say "we have a copyright on the blueprints to your home, so pay us $5,000 a month or we'll revoke your license to use your garage by burning it down". That's mob tactics.

A better analogy might be that they have a patented box embedded in the foundation that controls the interface between your plumbing and the sewer system. To have working drains, you have to buy a software key to enable it. The keys expire whenever they decide they should and cost however much they feel like charging. Maybe a couple $ every 6 months. A few years down the road, it could be hundreds of $ every month.

Maybe the developer isn't even the one who jacks up the rates, but it's instead a private equity firm which instigates a hostile takeover. That's like what happened to the prescription drugs industry, a few years ago.

 

[TerryLaze]

And big banks can do whatever they want, like leveraging themselves to the hilt... oh, no they can't!

Where there are societal interests at stake, freedoms of companies to "do whatever they want" can be constrained. Heck, even a private individual's freedoms are restricted by laws, and their interests can be infringed by eminent domain if they're at odds with a compelling societal interest.

Yes, obviously I meant inside the law, this goes for the "owning" of property for normal people as well, we only own something because the laws allow for that.

A better analogy might be that they have a patented box embedded in the foundation that controls the interface between your plumbing and the sewer system. To have working drains, you have to buy a software key to enable it. The keys expire whenever they decide they should and cost however much they feel like charging. Maybe a couple $ every 6 months. A few years down the road, it could be hundreds of $ every month.

This is more like buying a prefabbed home but only paying for the bedroom the bathroom and the kitchen (a basic livable home) , and then having the option to pay more to use the rest of the rooms, some people might not need them ever, others might pay for everything from the start.
Obviously with homes doing that would be immensely more expensive but for CPUs it's cheaper to have a prefabbed one and selling it piecewise depending on the needs.

Also is it clear if it's a subscription or a one time unlock?

 

[bit_user]

This is more like buying a prefabbed home but only paying for the bedroom the bathroom and the kitchen (a basic livable home) , and then having the option to pay more to use the rest of the rooms, some people might not need them ever, others might pay for everything from the start.

It's unclear, without knowing which aspects will ultimately be controlled by this mechanism. It could be something as essential as plumbing. I'm imagining a day when you buy a 56-core CPU with only 4 cores enabled by default. Basically, just enough to install and boot the system. All of the rest must be unlocked with additional keys.

Also is it clear if it's a subscription or a one time unlock?

Right now, they're probably not time-limited. However, that can change easily enough.

BTW, I wouldn't expect you could circumvent that by playing with the system clock. Most likely, the keys would work according to powered-on hours, which would be tracked internal to the CPU.

 

[TerryLaze]

I'm imagining a day when you buy a 56-core CPU with only 4 cores enabled by default. Basically, just enough to install and boot the system. All of the rest must be unlocked with additional keys.

If you could get it for 4% of the price and it would help you to figure out if your software would run on it without issues or at all or at what speed it would be a good deal to some.

 

[bit_user]

If you could get it for 4% of the price and it would help you to figure out if your software would run on it without issues or at all or at what speed it would be a good deal to some.

Assuming the keys were perpetual and that the total price was still competitive, yes.

I think it's really the OEMs who would suffer, due to customers initially buying a config from them to meet immediate needs, and then adding more capabilities as-needed. This avoids them having to pay up-front for future needs, which is taking money out of OEMs' pockets. I don't mind that, but they probably do.

 

[TerryLaze]

Assuming the keys were perpetual and that the total price was still competitive, yes.

I think it's really the OEMs who would suffer, due to customers initially buying a config from them to meet immediate needs, and then adding more capabilities as-needed. This avoids them having to pay up-front for future needs, which is taking money out of OEMs' pockets. I don't mind that, but they probably do.

But that would assume that OEMs would pay full price for that CPU even if it's set up as minimum config...otherwise how are they going to lose money?!

If intel sells these with all the extras locked then the 1000 unit price will be for that locked performance and what the end user does is their issue.

This would actually help OEMs because they could buy CPUs for cheaper so they could buy,make, and sell more systems and so sell systems for cheaper, everybody wins.
(other than the selling your soul to the devil part)

 

[Joe from Corgitech]

so intel figured out a way to bring subscriptions to the cpu world.

DIAF!!!!!

they have always price gouged on enterprise level stuff and now they want to price gouge and then make you pay to use what you already purchased.

again DIAF!!!!!

After Q4 price hike "well only 49% of customers told us to diaf, how do we get this metric up?"

It's super jarring learning about this stuff from Tom's hardware and not via the partner portal buys as much epyc hardware as I can get my paws on

 

[Joe from Corgitech]

Assuming the keys were perpetual and that the total price was still competitive, yes.

I think it's really the OEMs who would suffer, due to customers initially buying a config from them to meet immediate needs, and then adding more capabilities as-needed. This avoids them having to pay up-front for future needs, which is taking money out of OEMs' pockets. I don't mind that, but they probably do.

Most OEM's have a bunch of subscriptions to bundle with their products already, they'll probably get a subsidized rate to incorporate this into those.

 

[chalabam]

@Math Geek if someone out there could figure a way to make subscription only air, they would. This should come as no surprise.

It's called "carbon tax"

 

[MoxNix]

This type of crap should be made illegal and punishable by huge fines.

 

[USAFRet]

This type of crap should be made illegal and punishable by huge fines.

Why?

1. No one is forcing you to buy into that particular platform.
You do realize this is aimed a server platform, right?

2. Paying extra to unlock features and capabilities, in either hardware or software, has been a 'thing' since computers and software were a thing.

 

[pug_s]

Intel wants to take queues from the old IBM days where you can software unlock performance for the CPU during the mainframe days. This kind of business model for Intel is stupid because you can simply buy another CPU and you can upgrade it yourself.

 

[bit_user]

Most OEM's have a bunch of subscriptions to bundle with their products already, they'll probably get a subsidized rate to incorporate this into those.

I'm sure. But, it's still likely to be bad for OEMs, as customers won't buy that extra capacity up-front and then will go straight to Intel, when they eventually need it.

 

[bit_user]

It's called "carbon tax"

No, that's something different. Carbon tax is trying to address the problem of "externalized costs". Without a tax, you create pollution, the costs of which are borne primarily by others. Even with a carbon tax, it's unlikely to be high enough to truly offset all of the damage.

 

[bit_user]

This kind of business model for Intel is stupid

I think it's brilliant, because they can manipulate prices to skew the perception of their products. When they launch a new CPU model, they can price the upgrades low, so that their products look artificially more cost-competitive than Intel can really afford to make them. Later, by the point that most customers will actually be able to buy them, or perhaps down the road when you actually need to add extra capacity, they can jack up the prices which most users will simply pay, rather than toss out and replace their hardware.

because you can simply buy another CPU and you can upgrade it yourself.

Not if everyone else adopts this model, also.

We can probably assume Intel's lawyers have patented the heck out of this, which will probably prevent their competitors from adopting it. However, it would probably be in Intel's best interest if everyone did it so that customers wouldn't be dissuaded by it.