News Intel Officially Introduces Pay-As-You-Go Chip Licensing

[Tech0000]

For data centers ok. They are used to this model and can pass on pricing dynamically so it makes sense for Intel, the DC operators and their end customers. It will be more efficient and dynamic pricing - so fine. all good.

But for consumers this is an extraordinarily bad idea and is just a shameless attempt of a greedy money grab, probably invented by some idiot at the marketing department who've read Kotler too many times.
I detest this idea! Absolutely detest it.

If intel goes this way with prosumer/consumers desktops (including HEDT and Workstation Xeons) I am done with Intel! and it will be AMD all the way.
Not going to care if Intel will "price it competitively", "pay for what you need" or use some other marketing slogan garbage - I know how this movie ends... think Core i9 365.
Nah, there is no upside for prosumer/consumer in this, just unused silicon sitting in a CPU that you bought but some how no longer own the right to fully use - I absolutely hate this!

For the record, over the years I've built dozens of pure Intel HEDT/WS systems for me, friends and family - never AMD.
But if Intel goes this way on the HEDT/WS (or worse the DT tiers below ) I will switch away from Intel 100%.

Vote with your $$$s. I will!

 

[USAFRet]

I see a lot of gnashing of teeth, and 'waa waa Intel sux!'

What, in any of the text in the article (or anywhere else), would lead one to believe that this is aimed at consumer grade CPUs?

FTA:
Intel's Xeon Sapphire Rapids
But as they scale their data centers
For now, Intel's On Demand program is reserved for servers, and we would expect it to remain a prerogative of Xeon platforms

Save your angst for where it counts.

 

[BryanFRitt]

Another point of view... This is renting to reduce features for everyone else.

 

[krr711]

Outrageous greed and an obvious security risk.

I don't often say "this should be illegal", but this should absolutely be illegal. It spits in the face of our basic human right to own the property that we buy.

Imagine buying a car that can disable your steering wheel whenever the car company arbitrarily decides they want more money.

Most agree with your comment. I do because you are paying for the chip upfront but not getting all the access. Then pay extra for 100% of the power. There will be some pay extra after they buy the chip so they can say we can use all of the power. Similarly, John Deere has its equipment tied up in software. You have to pay them for service work. Intel is desperate. I like the company but TSMC is so far ahead it will take 5 years to catch up. We'll see how this plays out but I don't think it will be too popular with the enthusiast market.

 

[kanewolf]

We'll see how this plays out but I don't think it will be too popular with the enthusiast market.

This has nothing significant to do with the enthusiast market. These are probably multi-thousand dollar CPUs. In 8 years there will somebody buying them from scrapped servers, but at launch. No.

 

[Bmew997]

Interesting they're offering both a subscription and a pay once model. They don't seem keen on a repeat of Intel Upgrade Service.
This seems more like a cost saving measure so they can just print out less processor variants and then charge more to unlock whatever the extra specialized features, whether someone wants to pay a larger sum upfront or just pay a presumably indefinite fee is up to them. This'll probably be fine with most businesses, but they may have just given AMD the hobbyist server market.

Wonder if they'll be offering chips that have these features already enabled out of the box but they just cost more.

 

[jkhoward]

Well, I will never be buying Intel again. Unbelievable.

 

[Math Geek]

This seems more like a cost saving measure so they can just print out less processor variants and then charge more to unlock whatever the extra specialized features,

have no doubt this is being done in answer to the stockholders DEMANDING more money. cost saving is not the motivation here. it is simply following others in a way to milk as much cash as possible for as long as possible from their "customers"

saw this yesterday.

Mercedes Will Make Your EV Quicker . . . If You Pay $1200 a Year

EQ owners will soon be able to purchase an annual subscription that unlocks extra power and quicker acceleration.

www.caranddriver.com

keep pretending it is not gonna happen but the writing is on the wall. all you have to do is read it........

i give it a year, 2 at most before we see exactly what i said above. you'll pay full price for a consumer cpu from them and then be expected to pay monthly to actually use what you just bought to its fullest.

 

[Tech0000]

have no doubt this is being done in answer to the stockholders DEMANDING more money. cost saving is not the motivation here. it is simply following others in a way to milk as much cash as possible for as long as possible from their "customers"

saw this yesterday.

Mercedes Will Make Your EV Quicker . . . If You Pay $1200 a Year

EQ owners will soon be able to purchase an annual subscription that unlocks extra power and quicker acceleration.

www.caranddriver.com

keep pretending it is not gonna happen but the writing is on the wall. all you have to do is read it........

i give it a year, 2 at most before we see exactly what i said above. you'll pay full price for a consumer cpu from them and then be expected to pay monthly to actually use what you just bought to its fullest.

This is exactly what i fear will happen and what also intel is trying to figure out how to do to their corporate and consumer customers. and I'll be the end of Intel for me.
Enterprises love the subscription model and are trying to come up with ways to transform their current business model from pay once to subscriptions.
Our jobs as buyers is to, everywhere we can, vote with out $ and reject that model. Competition is the key to solve this.

 

[roczi]

What the FFFFFF? There's already cloud computing services for this.

Its like printers used to be bought and its fully yours, just pay for ink. Until they think of a income model to make corporate printers subscription based so they can milk businesses perpetually.

Now imagine they wanna start making pay per printer feature. "want to print double sided? pls subscribe. only A4 allowed, want A3? pls subscribe."

i tell yall, the world is full of greed. and this greed will be the sore of society, morality and eventual downfall.

and you do not really want this set as precedence because it will come to the consumer grade CPU one day. Someone is bound to start tapping this market when the prosumer or corporate grade level are already saturated, and all the companies find "new ways" to make more money.

You know its coming once you start it, all companies will want to be early movers.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Pretty soon they’ll try to figure out how to do this for consumers I bet. The company that doesn’t do that is the one that gets my money. Hopefully if they do that on a consumer level someone finds a work around.

 

[Roberts1121]

The fact that people are getting outraged by this is insane. Chip makers already essentially do this. All mid/low end chips start as higher tier chips with features/cores just disabled. A 13900k and 13700k are the exact same thing. The difference now is that you can essentially buy the 13700k and then just pay a little more later to have it upgraded to 13900k instead of buying a whole new physical chip.

This also isn't really meant for end users at home, it is meant to simplify supply chains and ordering for server providers. This is great, and AMD would be wise to do the same. Supply chain simplicity is one of if not the biggest struggle for data center asset obtaining, and if a manufacturer can just order one item and change the price depending on the target performance, that is huge.

 

[Roberts1121]

For data centers ok. They are used to this model and can pass on pricing dynamically so it makes sense for Intel, the DC operators and their end customers. It will be more efficient and dynamic pricing - so fine. all good.

But for consumers this is an extraordinarily bad idea and is just a shameless attempt of a greedy money grab, probably invented by some idiot at the marketing department who've read Kotler too many times.
I detest this idea! Absolutely detest it.

If intel goes this way with prosumer/consumers desktops (including HEDT and Workstation Xeons) I am done with Intel! and it will be AMD all the way.
Not going to care if Intel will "price it competitively", "pay for what you need" or use some other marketing slogan garbage - I know how this movie ends... think Core i9 365.
Nah, there is no upside for prosumer/consumer in this, just unused silicon sitting in a CPU that you bought but some how no longer own the right to fully use - I absolutely hate this!

For the record, over the years I've built dozens of pure Intel HEDT/WS systems for me, friends and family - never AMD.
But if Intel goes this way on the HEDT/WS (or worse the DT tiers below ) I will switch away from Intel 100%.

Vote with your $$$s. I will!

What is "bad" about it for consumers? It isn't a "cash grab". This allows consumers to later upgrade if they choose to.

 

[Steve Nord_]

Wow. This is absolute genius. You can pay for exactly what you need, no more and no less.

The rest of you jackwagons "oh Intel is going to take away your CPU cores" don't have a clue what you're talking about. I would suggest reading the article before racing down to the comments to declare something "illegal" before you even understand the situation.

You had me at jackwagons. [Insert bollard / truck collision video here.] Seeing as the article had no goddamn dissipation / cost / coprocessor-function table, how do you see it? From the HPE link it looks like I'm buying Intel CPUs but to use AVX with the Intel compiler I'm being overcharged for carbon black first. Hard pass. My Pollyanna side says it's microcode driven AVX and neural compute and other stuff but I get to buy keys and max it out as a reasonable partition of the available configurations.

However, maybe it's a bunch of dead silicon, and Intel's Elon-proofing my organization by making me hire teams of 11 transformer engineers and a Xeon transformer license or 2, 11 posit product engineers and the Xeon posit SIMD for enough compute, 11 etc. etc. and it won't pan out completely for 7 years; when we can unlock SRE and decent partitioning of advanced function over our stupid Xeon investment.

But we have to change sockets for no reason then maybe. We just have to search the Arizona desert 🏜️ for the old Intel engineer who can even remember how popular AVX2048 was supposed to be.

 

[Steve Nord_]

I see a lot of gnashing of teeth, and 'waa waa Intel sux!'

What, in any of the text in the article (or anywhere else), would lead one to believe that this is aimed at consumer grade CPUs?

FTA:
Intel's Xeon Sapphire Rapids
But as they scale their data centers
For now, Intel's On Demand program is reserved for servers, and we would expect it to remain a prerogative of Xeon platforms

Save your angst for where it counts.

How about for my team of Xeon{AVX_Krunking} engineers who will never be able to corroborate a decent performance because it means buying more clouds' instances we have low vis. into? Meanwhile one SRE girl at Azure#54485 is killing it selling into her cryptomarket for cloud{AVX_Krunking} we'll find out about way later.

On 'retail side...' We're all 6 here (ordering a solar panel a year every holiday,) and as ppl who expect these chips to be dirt cheap in 15 years so we can finally play CoD:WZ:MLP but maybe the chip crypto could outlast that, it's important. Also pricechart and TDP hazards, WHERE?