The "TPM" you know today started life as Microsoft Palladium, an attempt by Microsoft to create a hardware DRM implementation for "content producers" that could tell the OS what was allowed and not allowed on your computer. The assumed goal at the time was that once the frog was sufficiently boiled it would be used to enforce Windows licensing as well. After much backlash they diverted their efforts into a cabal with Compaq, HP, IBM, and Intel to make it more general purpose and actually allow the end user to store keys.
Secure boot was mostly just a toy until Google implemented it in Chromebooks and the large customers you speak of pointed and said "I want that!"
You seem to imply customers demand bridled CPUs. Thinking about it, there is one scenario for which their "sw-defined silicon" (hello newspeak) would both make sense and not be too much of a fuckery: instead of their regular process that now consists of shipping unvalidated HW and waiting for complaints about bugs for triggering chicken bits in the next microcode, they could ship processor with only the properly validated parts enabled at first, and make people pay for extra perf or features when the remaining validation is actually completed and if it passes.
I do not really believe this is their intent thought: people are way too much continuing to act like mean 5% better perf on arbitrary benchmarks has any significance (even regardless of power consumption). So Intel will likely continue to ship broken but allegedly fast processors, and will continue to kill the perfs to remove the bugs once they sold enough.
Plus, in a competitive market, it would be an equilibrium hard to achieve if competitors are not making pay for their own deferred enablement.
There definitely are major customers (for example, cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot. It's not not something imposed by Intel, those features are required by an important part of the market, ignored by another important part of the market (unsophisticated consumers), and opposed by an small part of the market which is highly represented among tech and privacy enthusiasts here on HN, but is not really significant in size.
Yep. Being able to buy processors that don't trigger Oracle's core-count licensing (for example) but be able to vary cores on and repurpose them in the general VM farm is a thing that I have been very keen on in a past life.
"Dark Silicon" is actually ubiquitous in modern chips. They can't possibly run 100% of the chip while staying within power and thermal constraints - and this gets worse, not better as process technology improves. So, even if some of that dark silicon is "software defined" it just doesn't matter all that much.
If there's unused silicon in a chip, but it costs the same or cheaper and has the features they want, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a customer who's going to complain.
If it's possible, customers will buy as many of the cheap ones as they can, at the lower price, and aftermarket enable the unused silicon to get a better product, for less money, which may make the business people unhappy. This happened with some GPUs where they could be "upgraded" to be a better product with a soldering iron.
At the end of the day, I don't understand the umbrage at companies segmenting by software instead of hardware. As long as it's obvious what you're getting when you buy, and what you buy lives up to what you were promised, why should I care what it actually is?
If the company chooses to look the other way and allow relatively easy unlocks without promising stability, well, that's nice. But nothing I'm owed just because it was physically on the chip.
Now on the other hand, if a consumer company switches from a product model to a lease/HaaS model... that's an entirely different can of worms, and they can go to hell.
You are paying less for it, in retail CPU prices that are contingent on the same model with ME features being sold to integrators and enterprise organizations who use it.
If you're referring to IA-64, then what information available in 1994 would have made you believe that VLIW / EPIC wasn't a viable path to provide >1 IPC at competitive clock speeds? Something very many customers were asking for and wanted.
Some good ideas work. Some good ideas don't. Doesn't mean they were bad ideas, only that unknown at the time factors or future developments made them bad ideas.
Not sure how the rest of your comment relates to my point though. Customers may want better performance. Doesn’t mean they want your new architecture. They certainly didn’t want IA-64. That’s just a statement of fact.
And as for the link between architecture and performance, I'll turn the common quip: "You can have performance or architecture changes, pick two."
The debate between runtime parallelism vs compiler parallelism, and which would result in greater performance on real world workloads, was an open question at the time.
As it turned out, the market preferred answer was "Screw it, we'll push superscalar and add more cores." But that's non-obvious in foresight. See: the famous P68/NetBurst/Pentium 4 vs P6+/Pentium M struggles.
I broadly agree that it was non obvious and don’t really blame Intel for trying IA-64.
I was really (semi humorously) trying to push back against the parent comment saying that everything these firms have done has arisen directly from customer demand. Obviously firms must think that there is demand for new products or features but sometimes they just misunderstand the market.
To give another example was there really any demand from customers for x86 cores in smartphones or was it Intel just trying to establish a market presence?
But in the early-80s, Symbolics was making a lot of noise with Lisp machines, the late-80s AI winter hadn't yet set in, and there were certainly worse bets than CISCy "we need to integrate up the stack" ideas.
x86 on mobile is a hard one. I see why Intel did it: it's what they had. And I'm sure Microsoft was whispering some demand in their ear behind the scenes.
But it really only made strategic sense pre-App Store volume (so say pre-2010?). Once the mass of code existed on ARM and built for iOS, that genie wasn't going back in the bottle.
As far as I've heard it told, that was more of a financial business decision though. Intel wasn't willing to cut its margins, because it couldn't see trading volume for margin as mobile exploded.
If they'd been able to offer the market cheap, sufficiently performant, power efficient chips for mobile, I think present would look a lot different.
TPM and SecureBoot came directly from large customers requesting exactly that.
HN (and more broadly, PC users) aren't all of the market for CPUs.