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"The first is an activation model, which allows users to enable features on Xeon processors through a one-time activation. This involves a six-step configuration process, where the customer makes an upgrade request to an infrastructure provider, which then shares the request with Intel to receive a license for the customer, according to an official diagram."

fuck this bull shit. no fucking "pay to win".

i already dislike software vendors doing pay to enable features.

we going to need either ARM or RISC-V. if Intel is doing this bullshit on x86.

It seems to be a common thing among corporations. The need for infinite growth to the point where they sabotage themselves into bankruptcy. Tech switched from engineers doing cool and useful things to MBAs trying to optimize every penny. Why can't businesses just be happy making enough money to pay their salaries? I guess i know why, we have a inflationary currency...and so income needs to increase infinitely since the value of the dollar decreases infinitely.

Hopefully this is a result of the fed running a fake economy on free money for the past decade and not a failure of switching off the gold standard.

Presumably, as salaries and cost need to go up due to inflation so would price, so I don't think this inflation explanation works?
Blame Milton Friedman.
Wasn't Milton Friedman against most of the things the person you are responding to is considering to likely be to blame?
Intel's software-defined silicon service will let organizations pay money to enable features that are hardwired into future Xeon server processors such as Intel Software Guard Extensions, signaling a major shift in how users pay for computer chips.

That's an... interesting way of framing it. It would be more accurate to say that intel plans to intentionally break their own hardware and then ransom that functionality back to users. I wonder how much cheaper these chips might have been to manufacture if not for all the superfluous DRM bloat and engineering time squandered on its development.

In some ways this is a continuation of their behavior a few years ago when they were abusing their market dominance in earnest. I hope AMD stays away from this cancer and continues to make superior processors.

I would like to think the market can kill this practice, but given how it's spreading in the automotive industry im not holding my breath.

This kind of thing made sense when IBM sold literal big metal on-prem hardware. It makes no sense in a virtualized cloud environment of cattle hosts. Who wants to deal with the overhead of managing licenses and not using the full yield capabilities of latest gen hardware.

The problem that Intel has is that when they fall behind in engineering and revenue from superior products, they turn to business hacks to make up for it. That used to work in the past when they dominated with less interchangeability, but today with AMD being strong and ARM growing, may only trade short term revenue for long term decline.

This seems a lot like taking the existing model Intel has had for decades (fusing out parts of the design or deliberately underclocking them after characterization) and just neatening the infrastructure. I don't see any reason someone would buy these devices and then 6 months down the line turn around and go "Oops I need your software guard extensions". It's always been a dirty secret of the chip industry that they all produce about 3 actual types of chip presented to customers as 3 million variants.
Are there realistic situations where a customer would realize they need the extra silicon partway into owning the chip? Some of the features I can see this, e.g. a business need could emerge and it would be nice to just activate a module rather than upgrade physical hardware. With others, like the balancing feature for telecoms, I’d think all telecoms would purchase with the feature in mind from the start.
I think this is a bad idea (people left IBM in the 70s for this) but I’d bet the pitch is something like enterprises reassigning equipment or trying to reduce the number of different things they purchase, where you’d only enable it on the servers where you need it. I’d be surprised if many customers found that effective, however, and I’m betting there’ll be at least one fun security exploit either bricking systems or figuring out how to get Intel to bill someone.
This is really smart and cool. Instead of replacing hundreds or thousands of CPUs, you can just pay to unlock more performance.
This is a good joke. I fear that people would just start to ignore those features. And when the compiler cannot compile code for your $$ extension, good luck selling it.
What do you mean by "the compiler"? The compiler you downloaded from GNU.org which was written by unpaid volunteers, or the official Intel compiler which anyone targeting high-end Xeons should use? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler)
:(