Re: Smells like copy-protections
Is paying per core really such a bad thing? It opens up a good capacity on demand model which will suit some customers down to the ground. If you want all the capacity, you just pay for it.
As for shutting off cores when behind on licensing, that would require them to have privileged access on the system in question. If you trust your vendors with that, you probably should keep up to date on your license fees/support costs!
Being less paranoid, it seems to be all about being able to squeeze higher clock speeds out of the chips dynamically for single threaded workloads. Given that clock speeds on Intel have stuck at about 2.5GHz-3.5GHz for several years, anything which can push that single threaded workload through faster has to be a good thing for end users.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
