News Intel's Pay-As-You-Go CPU Feature Gets Launch Window

[salgado18]

Selling something with all the features at the same price as the competitor sells the base unit is the surest way to go belly up, you loose all your profit doing that and if you are successful you take away all the sales of the competitor, so neither company is making any money, that's how you turn a healthy market into a dead one.

If the company can sell a full-feature product at the same price as the less-features product of the competitor and still turn a profit, how can it go belly up? Also, it hardly will take away all the sales, at most it will sell more, but many customers still want the other product and may even like the new business model. But the fact that the full-feature product will sell more is still a result of a healthy market, the better product wins more but not absolutely.

 

[Krotow]

Your example is exactly what binning is: sell the same product with half the performance/speed/cores for less money. That is all good.

Binning is something else. It mean naming worst performing or partially faulty chips under different names for profit. Eq. selling CPUs with faulty cores or partially impaired cache by blocking faulty areas before selling as lower models with less cores and less cache. Selling analog chips and simple semiconductor components with worse parameters as different models cheaper and so on.

 

[InvalidError]

Selling something with all the features at the same price as the competitor sells the base unit is the surest way to go belly up, you loose all your profit doing that and if you are successful you take away all the sales of the competitor, so neither company is making any money, that's how you turn a healthy market into a dead one.

How has AMD's resurrection come about? By offering everything it could as baseline to increase its value vs Intel's nearest equivalents. None of that BS with charging $1000 extra for large memory support, extra PCIe lanes, 2S/4S and a bunch of other features sold separately on Intel's Xeons.

 

[InvalidError]

So hopefully this effort to simplify their overly segmented CPU lineup crashes and burns, but then you want to simplify their overly segmented CPU lineup?

There is a difference between SKUs that exist due to a material need to turn sub-par parts into sellable product and SKUs that exist only for the sake of monetizing insignificant incremental things that should be stock or not exist in the first place.

Practically nobody needs multiple otherwise identical CPUs rated within 200MHz from each other and there is fundamentally zero cost difference between a memory controller that supports 4TB of RAM vs 2TB vs 1TB, especially when the circuitry for 4TB is already baked into 1TB SKUs anyway and it is exceedingly unlikely that a memory controller defect would only affect the memory address 2MSBs in a salvageable manner.

 

[jkflipflop98]

There is a difference between SKUs that exist due to a material need to turn sub-par parts into sellable product and SKUs that exist only for the sake of monetizing insignificant incremental things that should be stock or not exist in the first place.

Practically nobody needs multiple otherwise identical CPUs rated within 200MHz from each other and there is fundamentally zero cost difference between a memory controller that supports 4TB of RAM vs 2TB vs 1TB, especially when the circuitry for 4TB is already baked into 1TB SKUs anyway and it is exceedingly unlikely that a memory controller defect would only affect the memory address 2MSBs in a salvageable manner.

So what? How do you as the end user know what functionality has been disabled at the factory? You don't. How does it affect you in the slightest if the 3.2ghz cpu in your PC is actually capable of 5.2ghz? You paid for 3.2ghz and you got it. You act as if there's some moral high ground to using a defective die vs. purposely disabling features. There isn't. I'll cut you in on a little secret, almost all of Intel's i7 and i9 die are capable of top bin performance and the vast majority are cut down to lower bins - simply because you don't sell enough top-tier silicon.

And again, the CPU in your PC and the CPUs in the server that host this forum already have features disabled exactly like this with the one difference being that there's no way you can unlock any addition functionality without purchasing an entirely new processor.

 

[InvalidError]

So what? How do you as the end user know what functionality has been disabled at the factory? You don't. How does it affect you in the slightest if the 3.2ghz cpu in your PC is actually capable of 5.2ghz?

You know the features are disabled from factory because all SKUs within a given range are made from the same die design. As for CPU clocks, the recent flurry of overclocking records broken by locked low-end parts shows that the low clocks are mostly artificial too.

The point was that most of Intel's SKUs exist for purely arbitrary reasons. If Intel wants to simplify its SKU list, it should start with weeding out the dumbest options that have no meaningful impact on yields. You don't see trivial feature splits in AMD's EPYC product stack.

 

[TerryLaze]

How has AMD's resurrection come about? By offering everything it could as baseline to increase its value vs Intel's nearest equivalents. None of that BS with charging $1000 extra for large memory support, extra PCIe lanes, 2S/4S and a bunch of other features sold separately on Intel's Xeons.

AMD increased the price of the top tier desktop CPU from the ~ $300 intel would charge to $500... It's the complete opposite of what you are talking about, I agree charging more is how you get strong companies, not by offering more for less money.

 

[timtiminhouston]

I have even more reasons to push for AMD adoption. The platform longevity of AMD is several times that of Intel at this point and the feature sets being completely unlocked on AMD mean it is a no brainer. I have all AMD at home and do push for it when we order new servers for our dedicated refresh. If Intel is intent on committing corporate suicide so be it. This is short sighted to say the least. And comparing Intel to Tesla is not valid; Tesla only exist because of government largesse. We literally printed billionaires into existence with the cheap money supply for the last 10 years-it went to a few at the expense of the many as is usual. We the normies are now stuck with inflation that is about to hit South American levels to repay the loans we collectively made so the billionaire class could grow and keep us all healthy and happy. No way around it-inflation is about to go crazy unless they raise rates to 7% overnight. And that is going to crash the market-and all the Tesla buyers will suddenly have less stupid money to play with and sensible electric cars like Nissan and Toyota and Chevy and Ford will survive while Tesla will need continuous bailouts to survive and because we handed our space program to the billionaires club we will have no choice but to continue subsidizing them until the sun burns out.

 

[InvalidError]

AMD increased the price of the top tier desktop CPU from the ~ $300 intel would charge to $500... It's the complete opposite of what you are talking about, I agree charging more is how you get strong companies, not by offering more for less money.

For the first three years of AMD's comeback, it sold fully-featured products at significantly discounted prices and still managed to pull itself out of the hole.

Today's prices are heavily inflated just because they can, not due to any costs-related concerns. If they were raising prices out of necessity, their net income would be at sub-10%, not 20+%.

 

[JamesSneed]

If he CPU DLC you got is a core count upgrade, the only way you are getting that out of EPYC-based systems is a physical CPU swap which is far more labor-intensive and will require even more extensive re-validation since you have a whole different chip instead of the same chip with fewer things still pay-walled.

That's not valid because said EPYC CPU probably already had more cores in the first. When Zen4 lands these shenanigans will hurt Intel as there will be virtually no reason to choose Intel CPU's in the data center.

 

[InvalidError]

That's not valid because said EPYC CPU probably already had more cores in the first.

Doesn't change the fact that the only way to get more core on a given EPYC motherboard when you don't already have a maxed-out SKU in there is a CPU swap.

 

[Robert Watabuut]

I'll cut you in on a little secret, almost all of Intel's i7 and i9 die are capable of top bin performance and the vast majority are cut down to lower bins - simply because you don't sell enough top-tier silicon.

Ironically, they would probably sell far more top-tier silicon if they dropped their prices a hair instead of intentionally handicapping their product. And they'd probably make exactly the same amount of money, while also building brand loyalty, instead of eroding it.

 

[Deleted member 14196]

So why would anybody buy these? Why in gods name would you buy this when they are superior AMD products for every operating system and machine

 

[InvalidError]

So why would anybody buy these? Why in gods name would you buy this when they are superior AMD products for every operating system and machine

12th gen vs Zen 3 is a clear win for Intel in most cases. How Intel's DLC CPUs will line up against EPYCs from the same product cycle year remains to be seen. Intel's success with paywalling features wouldn't make much sense when most of those features are baseline on EPYC unless Intel plans to undercut AMD for otherwise equivalent performance like it has with Alder Lake.

 

[aawwssee]

This kind of anti-consumer crap shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.

F*ck intel

 

[bp_968]

This will do more than create a leasing system for CPU features. It will create an entirely new revenue source from used hardware. Before this I could buy a couple generation old xeon if I wanted to have a machine doing server specific stuff. With this it will force SMB and hobbyists to purchase or leases features, something they likely won't be able to afford if the past is any indication.

This really irritates me because its yet another reason to use AMD which means yet another reason to buy a product made at TSMC which is a terrible and dangerous global bottleneck (as we have already seen the past few years).

It reminds me of microsoft trying to make xbox software non-transferable without the purchaser of the used disk buying a "new" key.

Sadly capitalism seems to have fully discovered the subscription model and now everyone wants to sell you a subscription for everything.

First we started outsourcing products to the lowest bidder and creating a market where everything was disposable and so they got repeat business when you tossed that broken 5 year old washer and dryer. Then they started selling "extended warrantees" to make people feel better about buying stuff that only lasts a few years. Then they discovered subscription models so now they want their monthly pound of fat.

Im pretty pro capitalist but this relentless destruction of ownership is pretty depressing.

 

[InvalidError]

This will do more than create a leasing system for CPU features. It will create an entirely new revenue source from used hardware. Before this I could buy a couple generation old xeon if I wanted to have a machine doing server specific stuff. With this it will force SMB and hobbyists to purchase or leases features, something they likely won't be able to afford if the past is any indication.

The features you couldn't afford on conventional you-get-what-you-get CPUs won't necessarily be any cheaper in DLC format. Since every field-upgradable CPU needs to have a golden sample die, I would expect the baseline price to go up to compensate. If you couldn't afford Intel's server CPUs before, they may become an even tougher sale now, especially at the lower end where most of the CPU is disabled.