Raspberry PIs have had a similar thing with VC-1 and MPEG-2 decoding requiring a small fee for about a decade now. In this case, to cover the patent licensing cost so as to not add it into the base hardware, but paying a fee to unlock features resident in the hardware is not new in computing. (I realize there are likely other/older ones I'm sure, but that was the first in my mind)

Yes and even with MPEG-2 patent expired, they are still offering that https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ so not sure how that cost breaks down today.

Raspberry probably isn't profiting from it though, they're legally obliged to do it, and they are also trying to make their hardware cheap as possible, so making it optional in a device like RPi makes sense.

I don't think the big players have the same intentions though.

IBM been doing that with their CPU's for a while. Current flavour of doing it is bannered under capacity on demand - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power8?topic=features-capacity-d...

In the field of physically-large CPUs I don't find this surprising. DEC 10's came in a wide range of models, and a KA10 variant for example could be field upgraded to a better variant, e.g. certain byte-access instructions added to extract bytes from 36-bit words, hardware floating point, and so on could be added. A technician would come and stick in some boards and wire-wrap them to the rest of the machine, and the machine's owner would pay for that. I only know of this with IBM and DEC but I would not be surprised if all the expensive machines were field-upgrade-able.

Companies are really trying to take money from everything now...