Dear Intel: Sue Me

http://www.zachbruhnke.com/intel-unlock-immora

by zbruhnke • 16 years ago

10 41 16 years ago

Intel's recent threat to sue consumers or companies who choose to unlock the capabilities of their processors spurred this rant, I apologize to those who did not enjoy it. thanks for reading

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Let me get this straight. Intel sells you a chip with X amount of L3 cache. You buy the CPU because you agree that's a fair price for a CPU with that much cache. You later find out that Intel snuck an extra megabyte of L3 cache into the silicon, so you can upgrade over the Internet instead of having a new part shipped to you. And you think this is immoral?

Intel could just as easily have (a) charged everyone $50 more for the CPU, even those who don't care about the performance upgrade; or (b) shipped a part that couldn't be upgraded at any price. Both of these outcomes are strictly worse for consumers.

tzs2• 16 years ago

Or they could have sold him a chip with X amount of L3 cache and no extra cache snuck in, and then priced the chip lower since it costs them less to make. That choice is better for the consumer.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

You're only taking variable costs into account, and forgetting about the likely tremendous fixed costs of having different manufacturing lines so they can vary the L3 cache for different versions of the same chip.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

That choice isn't better for the consumer. The choice you've set up is between:

(1) A chip that costs less because it has fewer capabilities that can't be upgraded.

(2) A chip that costs less because it has fewer capabilities that can be upgraded.

In neither (1) nor (2) does the price of an Intel CPU have anything to do with the cost of (say) "a transistor". You cannot go to the transistor mines and harvest yourself CPU ore; chips are not commodities.

zokier5• 16 years ago

It would probably cost them more to make a CPU with less L3 when they already have a design and production line for CPUs with larger L3.

techiferous6• 16 years ago

The price of goods does not reflect the costs, it reflects the demand. It only reflects the costs in a highly competitive, low-barrier to entry market.

Think about how you make your money. Are you paid based on the cost of your services or the demand? Which would you prefer?

netaddict• 16 years ago

Intel build a processor with X amount of L3 cache.

They sell it for $400 to initial buyers but "disable" 100 MB of L3 cache without telling them. Then after 6 months, just to make money of the initial buyers again of the same chip, offer this processor "upgrade" for $50. This is immoral and the initial buyers will feel cheated.

This case is not like software where programmers worked on something and then ask a price for upgrade. Intel had already made all investment and work before the purchase. Intel then already took a profit for selling the processor.

tptacek3• 16 years ago

Adobe requires $0 to build a copy of Photoshop. Pfizer requires $0.03 to make a pill. What does vendor cost have to do with market price?

The feeling customers have of being "ripped off" is irrational. If you buy a part with X L3 cache and find out later that you're a web page away from X+1M L3 cache, your vendor did you a favor.

sjs2• 16 years ago

Intel and AMD sell chips with some bad cache or faulty cores. What they do is disable the faulty components and sell it a lesser specced CPU. When manufacturing ramps up and kinks are worked out they might have to disable working parts to be produce those lesser specced (and cheaper) CPUs. All they're doing now is including a switch that customers can pay to flip, enabling those disabled components.

The only difference after this announcement is that people who may not have known about this practice now know about it, and Intel is giving people a "switch" to turn these parts on.

techiferous6• 16 years ago

"disable" "upgrade"

It's semantics. It's all in how you frame it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)

jacobolus2• 16 years ago

I think the part that people have trouble with is the idea of not having control over their own hardware. Not that I agree with this, but the reasoning is something like: if you buy a physical device, you own it, and should be able to do anything you want with it, including using its full capabilities.

The conflicting moral intuitions here are about ownership of an object vs. payment in exchange for a set of benefits. In terms of the latter, this is clearly a case where everyone wins, but that doesn’t prevent it from seeming “wrong” in terms of the former.

This is really quite similar to the “wrongness” people feel about, say, region-locked DVDs.

sjs2• 16 years ago

> if you buy a physical device, you own it, and should be able to do anything you want with it, including using its full capabilities.

Previously there was no official way to enable disabled cache or cores, though some motherboards provided such functionality. Now there is an official way but you have to pay for it. Intel is giving you more control over the hardware they sell you. I guess we could debate whether or not it's fair to charge for that capability, but considering that till now the general consensus is that low-end CPUs are ridiculously cheap for the given performance I don't feel like there's much to debate. 2 years after buying a low-end CPU you can pay $50 and unlock some extra cache or cores for even more performance, instead of upgrading to a new CPU (and possibly motherboard and RAM). Sounds like a win to me.

crystalis2• 16 years ago

Perhaps Pareto efficiency is an underlying cause for this response. Treating the chip as a fait accompli, boosting the cache doesn't hurt Intel and it benefits the consumer. In a world where white cotton tee shirts can sell for hundreds of dollars, option (a) satisfies more notions of "fairness".

"An economic system that is not Pareto efficient implies that a certain change in allocation of goods (for example) may result in some individuals being made "better off" with no individual being made worse off, and therefore can be made more Pareto efficient through a Pareto improvement."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency

zokier5• 16 years ago

But Intel is already also selling higher end models with those features enabled, at a higher price point of course.

semanticist4• 16 years ago

Perhaps the call to 'sue me' would have more weight if you'd already managed to hack the unlocking process.

But anyway, how are Intel doing anything to the 'free market'? In a free market Intel can sell whatever they like for whatever the market will pay for it. They're not quite a monopoly so if you don't like the 'unlockable' processor, don't buy a machine that uses it.

The only way I can make this rant make sense in my head is if the writer assumes that it's immoral to make a profit at all. My understanding of free market economics is limited, but I suggest that the author of that rant has an even worse understanding than I do.

tzs2• 16 years ago

What I want to know is if buyers of the chip who don't buy the upgrade are still paying something for the unused hardware.

Analogy: I pay a contractor to build me a house and specify an 800 sq ft finished basement. The contractor actually builds the house with a 1200 sq ft basement, but walls off 400 sq ft of it so that it appears to only have an 800 sq ft basement. For an modest fee (less than it would normally cost to have a real 800 sq ft basement expanded by 400 sq ft), I can have the contractor come in later and open up the extra 400 sq feet.

Whether this is cool or not depends on just how the contractor charged for the project. If it cost the contractor more to construct that extra 400 sq ft than it would to have constructed just an 800 sq ft basement, and he included that cost in figuring what he charged me, than I'd be mightily annoyed.

If, on the other hand, the extra costs associated with that extra 400 sq ft were eaten by the contractor, then I'd be reasonably OK with it.

Same with Intel. If they are charging me what they would have normally charged for a CPU with the "extra" stuff, and then charging me $50 later if I actually want to use it, then I would be annoyed. On the other hand, if they are charging what they would have normally charged for a chip that doesn't have the extra stuff, and so they are eating the cost of building a chip that costs more to make on speculation that I might later pay to buy access to the extras, that is fine.

reitzensteinm• 16 years ago

The chips are not priced on cost, they're priced at the level the market will bare, to earn back the massive fixed costs of design and fab construction.

Paying for unused hardware is a faulty way to think about it - in reality, you're paying a price set based on the performance of the part and its competition in the marketplace.

zbruhnke3• 16 years ago

Let me start off by saying, clearly I am the author of this post. While I understand the call to "sue me" seems to not carry much weight I assure you it is not far from being done and posted on my site. And while I can appreciate your post concerning my lack of free market knowledge you should know that it could not be further from the truth. I have built and sold several (albeit small) companies since I turned 18 and have continued on a daily basis to work on new products and releases every day because it's what I love not because it makes me money. While I understand the frustrations of some people with my rant (and that's exactly what this article is) I would also like everyone to realize what it is they are doing. Some would argue that they sell these at a going rate, however the truth is demand sets the price of processors. The fact that most computer users wait for prices to drop before purchasing the highest end products is a testament to that. However intel effectively takes advantage of those of us who always want the newest and best technology and then proceeds to drop the price to "fair market value" for the rest of consumers only to sell another "higher end" chip with several more features that in many cases are just unlocked from the previous version of the product. Paying for technology, should in effect, be paying for the research and development of the people who put their efforts into it. Intel simply believes that in paying for technology you should be paying for what they choose. My point in writing this article is not that it was a new concept. It was not even that intel was alone in these business practices, it was simply to point out that these practices are not fair to the consumers who support these companies. I never said this was not an example of the free market, I simply stated that sometimes the free market simply is not a fair market for the consumers who drive it.

semanticist4• 16 years ago

This is nonsense. Intel are trialling this on some low-end CPUs. They're not trying to aim this at the people who read Hacker News and always want the latest shiny tech.

Anyway, Intel aren't making CPUs for the love of it. They're doing it to make money for their shareholders. This isn't immoral or unfair. Paying for technology is like paying for anything, if you're pricing based on your costs then you're doing it wrong. You set your prices to maximise profit, not to meet someone's preconceived notion of 'fair'.

techiferous6• 16 years ago

"However intel effectively takes advantage of those of us..."

Since there is no monopoly, you have the right to choose to buy an Intel product or a competitor. You have the choice. It's your money; therefore, it's your power. It's not correct to say that Intel is taking advantage of you. The people of Bhopal are victims; you are not a victim.

"Paying for technology, should in effect, be paying for the research and development of the people who put their efforts into it."

Stated in another way, you believe that the prices of things should reflect the cost to produce those things. So your real complaint is not with Intel, it's with how the economy works.

jodrellblank• 16 years ago

Is this new? Am I misremembering that 3/486sx chips were dx chips with the coprocessor disabled?

xpaulbettsx• 16 years ago

Most chip manufacturers do this, but usually the extra silicon is disabled because that section has failed quality gates - the same thing happens in GPUs, they know the top n% will withstand higher clock rates, so they put those in the expensive cards.

This is new because Intel knows that silicon is good (or else they couldn't sell the upgrade), but intentionally disable it. People are upset because they feel like they aren't "buying" anything, it's just a perceived tax to get what already exists (I'm not saying that this is a fair perception, only that it's what most people will feel - I think this is a plan doomed to fail)

ScottBurson2• 16 years ago

It's much older than that. The tale is told, at least, that in the 1960s, IBM sold a model of 360 that could be upgraded to a faster model by flipping a single switch. They charged many thousands of dollars to send out a tech to flip the switch (if you did it yourself, I presume it would void the warranty).

halostatue• 16 years ago

There are firmware locks on a lot of IBM hardware still, unlocked with the right amount of $$ paid to IBM.

dotBen• 16 years ago

So it turns out the guy hasn't actually built any of this upgrade circumvention software/firmware yet, so I'm not exactly sure what he's asking Intel to sue him for.

Perhaps he should go play with the cracked HDCP crypto key instead; Intel says it will sue anyone who uses that (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/intel-threatens-con...)

ScottBurson2• 16 years ago

I'm shocked, shocked! that capitalist corporations charge what the market will bear for their products.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Let's reverse that, instead of writing what someone might do, I'll offer $250 for the person that cracks this upgrade scheme first and provides an easy to use piece of software to do the unlocking.

Anybody else want to chip in to increase the prize?

postfuturist• 16 years ago

I've been annoyed at Intel for awhile, and I've been happily voting with my pocketbook by only buying AMD powered laptops. Latest Intel annoyance: consumer grade "Pentium Dual-Core" chips, which are basically Core 2 Duos without VT-x instructions, so they are 64 bit processors that can't run 64-bit VM's. OK, that's old news, but annoying nonetheless when you've got one you are trying to get work done on.

zokier5• 16 years ago

I don't get why people are now angry at Intel. Both Intel and AMD have disabled stuff from their lower end for a long time. And now that Intel allows you to actually recover those features (which would be disabled in any case), they are the bad guys? I just don't follow that logic. Should Intel only make $1000 high end chips?

edit: I just want to add that if the unlocking happens via microcode update then you have practically zero chance of cracking it without at least copyright infringement.

And I don't know about the rest of you guys but I'd be bit nervous about applying a microcode update from unoffical sources.

rlpb• 16 years ago

Will Intel be chasing people legally for cracking this facility? If so, what legal means will they be using?

I am most worried about these legal implications. Never mind the L3 cache size; I would prefer it to remain legal for me to hack and modify my own hardware. I don't want to lose control over this ability. If companies can dictate what I do with the hardware after I buy it, then to what extent will this affect "hackability" generally?

Dear Intel: Sue Me

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