This is great "write a horror story in 7 words" content.

Ok, I'd like to pitch a Treehouse of Horror episode.

Part 1, combine branch predictor with the instruction trace cache to be able to detect workloads, have specific licenses for say Renderman, Oracle or CFD software.

Part 2, add a mesh network directly to the CPU, require time based signing keys to operate. Maybe every chip just has starlink included.

Part 3, In an BWM rent your seats move, the base CPU is just barely able to boot the OS, specific features can be unlocked with signed payloads. Using Shamir secrets so that Broadcom AND the cloud provider are both required for signing the feature request. One can rent AVX512, more last level cache, ECC, overclocking, underclocking.

The nice part about including radios in the CPUs directly means that updates can be applied without network connectivity and you can geofence your feature keys.

This last part we can petition the government to require as the grounds of being able to produce EAR regulated CPUs globally.

I think I'll just sell these patents to Myhrvold.

I want to emphasize this is not a defense of this behavior.

But didn't IBM do things like this for years with mainframes?

sir there are children reading this site.

I'm not sure I've ever laughed this much at a HN comment chain