Intel Xeon processors as services? Pay and we’ll unlock your cores

Are there any chances that the game-service format will be turned into a field of technology? According to the latest information from GitHub, found by Phoronix, Intel Xeon processors may be sold in an interesting way in the future, not only “once”.

Intel can go back in time and offer processors as services

If you remember the example of the 2010 Pentium G6951 processor, then you certainly know what we are talking about. Back then, Intel, through a $ 50 update, was providing the customer with an upgrade to that CPU’s performance with an additional 1MB of cache and Hyper-Threading. It was the first time it was sold like this after an Intel-made processor upgrade, and chances are the company will come back to it.

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This is the result of the aforementioned source, which concerns Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) for Xeon processors. In the description of this new “feature”, we can read that “it enables the configuration of additional processor functions through the license activation process”. We will not read more about it, but this one sentence clearly indicates what SDSi will be, although it is unclear whether it will be about something as far-reaching as unlocking the cores, or something simpler – higher clock speed or the cache deck.

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The most obvious seems to be providing support such as AVX-512 instructions or unlocking additional CPU sockets in servers. This will be done through authentication certificates stored in the internal NVRAM.