Intel let's you rent processors you bought
(archive.ph)
Comments (13)
sorted by:
Since they are talking Xeon, this sounds like a data center thing and no one will probably even bat an eye. I don’t do servers specifically , but the equipment I buy it’s very common to have to pay weird things like license fees on physical parts. A fee to enable a feature on hardware I already have wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest, and it sounds like that’s what this is.
Your oracle fees have gone up because Larry needs a new island...
You know more than I do. I hope this doesn't trickle down.
Yeah I hope not. I think I saw something a few weeks ago where they had tried something like this with a earlier Core CPU where you pay to activate more cores and it didn’t go over well. I don’t even like their K-series and overclock locking process despite the fact I don’t even care to try to overclock.
There was a weird case maybe 10-15 years ago where some digital camcorders had non-commercial licenses for the H.264 video compression patents, and people who were using those cameras for commercial use were getting letters from patent owners saying they needed to buy (expensive) commercial licenses for the patents.
These sorts of things have been a bit screwy for some time. But I also remember when online software activation was limited to expensive commercial software like AutoCAD and MATLAB, and now it's common in the consumer software world. Which doesn't give me confidence this sort of thing will stay in the business-to-business hardware world.
It's bullshit is what is it. But you're right that this stuff is easier for businesses to tolerate so they're conditioned to it now. Same with SaaS.
And as we all know, what started with enterprise packages soon filtered down to end users.
Microsoft is very open about the fact that they want everyone paying subscription fees for Windows one day.
Hello Linux future.
This is a really strange idea, and I am not certain I got it right.
Sounds like you got it right to me.
I suspect their justification will be that a lot of these features will have narrow use cases and will need to be controlled by drivers that will have to be maintained for what will be a small core of users.
But yes, this is absolutely Intel taking the position that the processor is in fact their property, not yours.
They (and the US government) want to own your machines.
Do not throw out your old computers. You may need them one day.
You will own nothing, and you'll be happy.
Seems like a step backwards. I'm reminded of my high school programming teacher's stories of using a mainframe in the 80s. They didn't have the computer. Instead, they used the phone to send instructions and receive results.