Intel Appears To Kill Pay-To-Unlock CPU Feature Model

Oldheads will remember the Pentium G6950 and the Intel Upgrade Service that came with it. What you may not realize is that Intel actually did the same thing with its 4th- and 5th-generation Xeon processors, codenamed Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids. These chips have "Intel On Demand", which "allows" you to enable specific features of your Xeon CPUs for an extra fee. This is what Intel calls "software defined silicon," and it's not popular.

That's likely why Intel seems to have terminated the program. At least, it's not present on the extant Xeon 6 and 600-series processors, and the GitHub project for the initiative has been archived, preventing future commits. Michael Larabel over at Phoronix spotted the archived project, and remarks that the Intel web pages for SDSi—the "Software Defined Silicon Initiative"—have also been removed from the company's website.

This move doesn't exactly come as a surprise, and it didn't even happen recently; Intel actually archived the project back in November. Even before that, though, the company hadn't produced any patches nor made mention of the program in some time, suggesting that it was already de-emphasized as a focus for the Xeon brand. As we noted, the latest "Granite Rapids" processors don't include SBSi/Intel On Demand.


So what features were locked behind "On Demand" support in the chips that supported it? Stuff like Intel SGX secure enclave support, QuickAssist compression and crypto accelerators, DLB hardware load balancing, the Data Streaming Accelerator memory bandwidth boost, the In-Memory Analytics Accelerator, and VROC NVMe RAID functionality. If you wanted to use these features, you'd have to pay up for a license for each one—or pay extra for the CPU up front to get a fully-enabled 'unlocked' version.

Intel made the argument that gating off features this way allows businesses to transfer costs from capital expenditures (CapEx) to operational expenditures (OpEx). Clearly companies weren't really hip with the narrative if Intel is killing the plan. People are always going to recoil from spending extra money to use features of a product they already purchased. It was true back in 2010, and it's true now. Hopefully someone figures out a 'jailbreak' for these locked-down CPUs so they can be unlocked when Intel inevitably stops supporting that service.

_{Shout out to Phoronix for the spot!}