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by kabdib 1440 days ago
Intel wanted to do this with floating point operations on the Pentium, in the 1990s. A set of e-fuses would give you access to (say) another hundred million floating point adds or something, then the CPU would burn a fuse and you'd have to buy more (a final fuse would do a complete unlock).

Yes, it's a horrible idea.

Cashing in on Excel users is what Intel marketing was betting on. Only it wasn't just Excel users using the FPU: One of the things that killed this plan was the upswing in 3-D games that used floating point math (in other words, Quake).

1 comments

Good reminder to stay with AMD if that’s an option for you.