[jsheard]

Intel briefly did have a scheme where you could pay to unlock parts of the processor that were disabled for segmentation reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Upgrade_Service

It was abandoned due to backlash but that didn't stop Intel from doing artificial segmentation, so instead of buying a chip with "3MB" of cache and being able to unlock it to 4MB later, now you buy a chip with "3MB" of cache and 1MB of dark silicon that's permanently lasered off at the factory. I get the objections, but the alternative isn't really an improvement.