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Re:Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features a... by otherotherchris on Sunday November 21, 2021 @11:34PM (#29302775)
Hyperscale and large corporate buyers aren't dumb enough to fall for this. Gimme everything enabled or I'll buy a neoverse or AMD thanks.

And I'd reckon at retail that sub-brand and product confusion leads to most customers buying the least costly and lowest spec version and tossing the machine in the bin if it's unsuitable.

Any undifferentiated "intel core i" processor is just the same as any other undifferentiated "intel core i" processor to the layman. Most laptops at retail aren't even labeled with the cpu model number. If the cpu is slow it's just because Intel products are crap.

Re:Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features a... by userbinator on Monday November 22, 2021 @12:01AM (#29302948)
I believe this practice actually started out with the enterprise stuff, i.e. the "large corporate buyers", and if anything, they are more likely to not care or embrace it.
Re:Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features a... by monocasa on Monday November 22, 2021 @12:09AM (#29302982)
Hyperscalers have already been bought in for years. There's custom Amazon, Google, etc. silicon in Xeons that either gets fused off in the general case or needs a secret MSR knock to turn on, or what have you.
Re:Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features a... by kmeisthax on Monday November 22, 2021 @12:55AM (#29303259)
Is there any public documentation as to what these features would be, and has anyone discovered ways to turn them on?

I remember hearing a few years back about Intel rolling a special weird Xeon SKU with VNNI/bfloat16 tacked onto a different core architecture that got cancelled, specifically because Facebook backed out of the project. However, I think that was intended to be a publicly-available SKU that just didn't make monetary sense to produce in volume.

There's also the occasional off-roadmap SKUs that eventually wind up on eBay or wherever... but my impression was that these were just ways for Intel to obfuscate whatever special volume deals they were giving certain hyperscalars.

Re:Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features a... by vsrinivas on Monday November 22, 2021 @05:12PM (#29312147)
Intel Cooper Lake - it's a 14 nm server part that fit a particular niche (4S support, VNNI/bfloat16). It was partly due to FB, but also partly to provide a platform that was larger than ICX server could / can.
Re:Intel Software Defined Silicon: additional CPU features a... by paulmd on Monday November 22, 2021 @11:04AM (#29307863)
enterprise customers have been the leading group demanding software-defined "capacity on demand" features for literally decades