Some of the LWN comments suggest this is similar to previous/existing gating of features being fused off for example or only some cores being enabled. I think this looks very significantly worse for multiple reasons though. While clearly much of it is pure segmentation for pricing, fusing features/cores can have genuine yield justification too. If some silicon is simply off for good then it doesn't need to work let alone be stable, so if testing reveals defects that can be a reasonable way to salvage a chip. That the lower probability and thus lower count defect free chips would cost more made sense. And fusing also at least requires commitment: once done, the chip is permanently less valuable, which is at least some check on overly aggressive artificial monetization.
The perverse incentives here seem a ton worse. There is direct incentive to be very aggressive with it, because even if they get the balance wrong they can adjust it later and employ all the marketing stuff done with software (50% off sale on vector math acceleration 2 days only!). It'll by definition always be used with features that the chips are fully capable of and thus even further pushes towards tiering capabilities without any connection to yield. The centralized control requirements moving further into underlying hardware are concerning as well from a redundancy and security perspective. I'm a big believer in businesses following the incentive tracks they create long term, for better and for worse. With this development, Intel's are diverging further from their customers'.
About the best that can be said is that at least the market now is a lot more competitive. Between Intel's fab woes, TSMC, AMD and both Arm and burgeoning RISC-V efforts, Intel is more on than I think they've been in a very long time. Maybe ever? Which does make it all the more curious to me why they're trying this now of all times. Seems like 5-7 years ago they'd have really has us. Now though it's just another thing in strong competitors favor. The end of a lot of core x86-64 patents is starting to kick off too. Or maybe Intel thinks this will let them do sticker prices that are drastically lower and thus look better vs AMD et al even as they can still extract more money in the end? It's worrying. In fact now that I think more on it, Intel weakening but using this brings its own extra worries. If they feel the need (or are forced) to juice returns for shareholders and themselves down the road if their competitiveness falters, or even if they regain dominance, they will have an installed base with a capability to squeeze it.
The worst thing here would be recurring payments, and also maybe the idea that Intel can act like platform providers, and revoke your CPU's license to execute code if they deem your usage unacceptable. Just another step towards you not owning the hardware you already paid for.
I hope AMD doesn't copy this. Intel has been on a downwards trend recently and maybe this is just a dumb, desperate move from them. As you say the landscape is getting more competitive, which is a good thing for consumers.
> I hope AMD doesn't copy this. Intel has been on a downwards trend recently and maybe this is just a dumb, desperate move from them. As you say the landscape is getting more competitive, which is a good thing for consumers.
IDK. EPYCs board-lock to boards with Platform by blowing e-fuses. In some ways that's a bit more painful. (I get that it supposedly provides a Secure Boot. OTOH HP has supposedly done similar without having to blow the fuses.)
> Just another step towards you not owning the hardware you already paid for.
I understand the sentiment, but Intel will argue you didn’t pay in full for your hardware, so you didn’t pay for the features you won’t be able to use.
I see this as a continuum. At one extreme end, you pay a lump sum for perpetual use of the hardware (“buying”). At the other extreme end, they lend you the hardware as long as you have a subscription to their offerings (“renting”). Somewhere in-between, they offer you some basic functionality or a lower subscription rate if you pay a sum up front.
We have that intermediate with cable subscriptions. You get X channels with the subscription, but have to pay extra for others, or for a higher quality signal.
Again, I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think that you can claim you paid for something if the seller says you didn’t, and the seller advertised that you wouldn’t get what you think you bought for the price.
And yes, I can understand customers not being happy about this.
No, we don't. We need to enforce right of First Sale, and stop propping up predatory buisness models by giving them a free pass.
The moment things started to not ship with programming guides, and everyone started hiding their IC schemata and docs for fear of being sued were the first steps down this path we're going down.
I will not continue to follow it blindly, and I hope more people will join me as well. This has to stop.
Independent of copyright law, people have a more fundamental right to contract as they wish. If people wish to pay less by allowing a lack of full control of hardware in their possession, then we shouldn't stop them. To assert otherwise is to deny them a basic liberty. True, if many accept such limitations then it creates a kind of market pressure, but that's just competition, and we have no natural right to be protected from competition.
That's very clever trying to cast it as the customer who is desirous of this contract, when in fact that can't be further from the truth; it is often the seller who is, in fact pushing a contract, which isn't a genuine contract as soon as they figure out the technical means to do so?
I reject your assertion of the supremacy of the contract. The contract is a vehicle subordinate to State regulation , and the State recognizes there are things that cannot be contractually done, selling oneself or another into servitude being one, and I hold, that violation of First Sale rights should be another. To do anything else is to undermine the very concept of private ownership. When industry colludes and makes standard the practice of not offering wares for sale under traditional terms, I hold this as an appropriate circumstance for the State to step in, particularly when it is made as obvious that poor faith is at the root of the business practice. Insult me not with assertions that finding a way to extract multiple payments, or extort out recurring revenue by "unlocking" functionality via firmware delivered over the air is anything but poor faith veneered in the illusion of convenience for the customer in light of the purveyor also gaining the capability to at will degrade the product by definition.
I think at some point, it will become a competitive advantage to sell devices and platforms that are not locked in. Kind of like the way Linux crushed the competition in the server space. Open hardware might eventually become what everybody wants. Seems like right now everyone is on a path to Windowsify everything, but that could change.
Sounds crazy? Keep in mind, people used to pay money for programming language licenses. How many people are doing that anymore? Are the people who pay for that kind of stuff competitive businesses?
I will be shocked if they do not make this a subscription based feature. And honestly, do you trust them not to make it one in the future? If given the opportunity, I expect them to seek rent.
Is it really that hard to imagine having microcode in the cpu or another separate processor implementing a timer that requires proof of continuing subscription via a new certificate being uploaded to it or else it does something like lock the main processor to a max speed of 200mhz?
> Or maybe Intel thinks this will let them do sticker prices that are drastically lower and thus look better vs AMD et al even as they can still extract more money in the end? It's worrying. In fact now that I think more on it, Intel weakening but using this [...] they will have an installed base with a capability to squeeze it.
I think this is the most concerning possibility... people building servers or devs and gamers will be able to wise up to the shenanigans and then pick a competitor; but punters walking around a computer store are not going to appreciate the differences if Intel get away with making big claims on the sticker (possibly even spinning "software defined silicon" as a way for them to upgrade hardware over the wire) - for the average consumer this would making an already difficult to achieve informed comparisons hopeless.
Reality may be different though, it's easy to assume the worst with the blue chips - perhaps this is just an optimisation on their current practices rather than a squeeze on customers, the concern is of course if they will exploit this new capability to the full potential we are all speculating on.
> ...but punters walking around a computer store are not going to appreciate the differences if Intel get away with making big claims on the sticker (possibly even spinning "software defined silicon" as a way for them to upgrade hardware over the wire) - for the average consumer this would making an already difficult to achieve informed comparisons hopeless.
This. I can already imagine it: "hey, my notebook was getting a bit sluggish, but I upgraded it over the internet with Software Defined Silicon(TM) and just spent $100 instead of $500 that a new one would've costed".
And everyone who knows the "extra" capabilities were already there to begin with would be screaming on the inside.
I'm not a huge fan of the HP ink subscription for privacy reasons (but my mom likes it), but isn't most of your comment just wrong?
- IIRC the printer will work without internet for a while (a week?), eventually you'll have to hook it back up though. (Makes sense to me if you're paying by the page.)
- You can't run out of pages. If you overrun your subscription, you just pay a few cents per extra page. Also, you can carry over pages up to a few months (so if your subscription is for 100 pages/month, and you didn't print in the last 2 months, you can print 300 pages this month without having to pay extra).
- Cost-wise, the subscription is actually a pretty good value compared to buying cartridges outright.
To add to others' opinions, HP have their offline driver very hard to find and almost can't install properly. Even what I want to use is the scan function on the printer, I will have to get internet access to open up a account with HP, or else the phone app and computer app just refuses to show the relevant pages...
Just outright annoying and would not buy any HP product again before they improve the situation
No, none of the comment is wrong, you're just confused.
> IIRC the printer will work without internet for a while (a week?), eventually you'll have to hook it back up though. (Makes sense to me if you're paying by the page.)
In other words printer doesn't work without Internet.
You know you have a bad point when the creators of the thing don't even agree with it:
If Your printer is not connected to the Internet, then the Instant Ink-activated Cartridges will be disabled and You will not be able to use them to print;
A grace period doesn't change anything about this.
> You can't run out of pages. If you overrun your subscription, you just pay a few cents per extra page.
In other words... you can run out of pages.
When you out of pages you're automatically forced to buy more pages, and if you don't, the printer won't print, regardless of ink level.
And the rollover had me howling with laughter, by capping rollover HP figured out away to literally take ink out of your printer if you don't use it!
Except it's "pages" they claw back of course, and instead of taking ink out, they just require you to pay for an additional month if you plan to use it even though it's sitting in the printer :D
> Cost-wise, the subscription is actually a pretty good value compared to buying cartridges outright.
It's not unless you buy the $20 a month plan and print 4,000 pages a month and they're mostly color...
> If you buy the highest-yield XL ink cartridges (2,000 pages monochrome and 1,600 pages color) for this AIO, each monochrome page will cost you about 2.2 cents and each color print will run about 8.8 cents. Subscribing to the company’s highest-yield Instant Ink subscription (700 pages for $19.99 per month, with each additional 20 pages for $1), each page will cost you 2.9 cents… Hence, it is with colorful, content-heavy pages that Instant Ink delivers the best value…
God help you if you're one of the unfortunate souls suckered into an "occasional use plan"...
You pay 6 cents a page
At which point even color prints are more expensive!
And this is literally anything you print! Even a piece of paper that says "the" costs more than a full page full glossy color photo from a cartridge!
-
C'mon, you really thought HP would literally lease you an ink cartridge and it'd be a good deal?
It seems to me that you fundamentally misunderstand the premise of the subscription... You're not paying for ink or cartridges in the first place, but for the service of printing.
It's also cheaper by your own admission (6 < 8.8) (assuming color prints, because why else buy a color printer?).
> Intel get away with making big claims on the sticker (possibly even spinning "software defined silicon" as a way for them to upgrade hardware over the wire)
Kind of like buy now, pay later. You can buy this cheap computer now but don't worry, you can always upgrade it later.
Will this result in an illegal number situation once the keys are found?
Also, to steel man Intel’s position, reducing hardware skus can improve yield and increase quality (due to the known silicon lottery phenomenon), that is one abstract benefit to consumers.
This is basically taking the tiered SAAS and trying to manifest that business model ability into hardware.
Depends on how they implement it. They will probably do it in a way where the license is linked to the processor’s serial number via cryptographic signature using public / private key pair so it can’t be installed on more than the part it is meant for.
In that case, that number has no use except with that specific processor. This is different than how DRM content protection works because the nature of that problem is different.
> This is basically taking the tiered SAAS and trying to manifest that business model ability into hardware.
IBM did it for years with mainframe pricing, they had excess mips installed and allowed burstable performance setups for a fee, on hardware you “owned”. Amazon took this strategy over, albeit without the ownership sham. Now Intel wants a slice. It’s turtles (ie greedy MBAs) all the way down.
IBM also did it with their POWER AIX boxes. The big difference was those instances were Business To Business contracts and not consumers. I get the feeling the consumer market will react differently to Intel.
The threat in business to business contracts, in addition to "we'll sue you" for licensing violations, is "that's an unsupported configuration, you're on your own."
This isn't a new idea for them. This particular implementation is new but they have tried this scheme before of selling feature unlocks after the initial purchase.
I’m rather a fan of this sort of stuff but only with my middle finger firmly raised at the vendor. Electronic test equipment has been doing this for a long time. You can buy a base model item for $1000 and crack it to the $5000 part in thirty seconds.
I think some vendors are doing it for purpose, there are trivial to use keygens available for years and they are doing nothing to stop it. That way they can increase value for hobbyists (who couldn't afford to pay for more than base model anyway, but they will pick it over competition which cannot be easily unlocked) but still earn more from big customers who have money and aren't willing to use keygens.
It may be easy to dismiss Intel's move to SDSi by saying "just buy AMD instead," but if this model turns out to be lucrative enough, there's no guarantee that AMD wouldn't follow suit. We'll have to see how this plays out and how it will affect the x86 landscape.
I cannot imagine this bet paying off for Intel, because I will be choosing AMD in all of the workstations for my engineering group. Beyond my own group, I will use my influence to be sure my entire organization avoids them as much as possible.
If anything, I expect this will hurt them where it counts. IT folk will not be amused and find other places to spend their money. The decision to lock up working silicon is radioactive and will have long lasting consequences on buying. I like to imagine this sort of decision being made across the world, as other engineers learn of these anti-consumer shenanigans and make waves in their own organizations.
> I will be choosing AMD in all of the workstations for my engineering group
Too bad AMD has largely ignored the workstation market. The last threadripper release was mid 2020 and is a Zen 2 product. Newer Zen3 based chips have been credibly rumoured, but AMD themselves havent said anything about it.
> Too bad AMD has largely ignored the workstation market. The last threadripper release was mid 2020 and is a Zen 2 product.
Intel has also been ignoring the workstation market (although perhaps not by choice).
Despite the current-model Threadripper being nearly two-years old and last generation technology, it is still far and away the performance leader in that segment in terms of perf/watt, perf/dollar, and oftentimes outright performance.
lots of slippery-slope-type ideas come to mind, including time-limited subscriptions that weren’t mentioned in the article
i think that environmental/ recycling/ reusage argument can be a good basis for a campaign for a blanket ban against any such measures in any customer electronics. it seems like a very important battle
I hate to be a hater, I grew up on Intel. But they’ve been doing increasingly desperate cash-grab stuff for years and years now. Oh great, let’s default all the ML stuff to the SIMD extension that doesn’t de-clock you. How did I ever live without it.
I want them to win on some level, but this isn’t how to do that. If I had to I could tweak/fix/touch-up re-build all my stuff on ARM and life would go on.
Sounds like what IBM is doing with mainframes - you always get a standard CPU module full of cores, and then pay for license to selectively unlock them. It’s been like this for… two decades now?
Shorter, used to be that you still had different CPU books (still might be so) but the leasing model where it often makes sense for IBM to ship more hw than less is very popular with clients.
Prime difference might be that from money point of view the way IBM handles it does end up in savings for the client (as it allows a pay-for-use/capacity rather than pay-for-hw model, and you can go 90% of the month in cheaper configuration and only pay for higher one for end of month/year ops).
Another difference is that technically with IBM you're paying a license for microcode running on the CPUs, and you mix and match differently licensed versions to match your workload.
IBM does this with their Power iron too. I had to get a Capacity on Demand (more like Crippled by Default) code to get the second CPU in my AIX POWER6 turned on. When the system planar had to be replaced, it had to be regenerated. What a pain.
OpenPOWER and PowerNV systems running on the metal don't do this, but if there's an LPAR involved (AIX, i5), you could be on the hook. The moral of the story is to buy your Power gear from a company like Raptor unless you must run AIX.
This could be good for consumers if implemented reasonably. If Intel can save money having just one product line, selling i7s at Celeron prices with cores just disabled in software, it could be good for everyone. Their method of disabling will probably take some time to crack, so people who buy these at Celeron prices can sell them as i7s, flooding the used market with good-performing CPUs.
We already see this with other hardware... Think Dell iDRACs and HP iLOs, which just need a few tricks to get all those licensed features once they're out-of-support and the vendor isn't keeping track of them as part of the support contract.
I'd also like to think this will lower the bar on upgrades during sales negotiations. HP, Dell and Lenovo are trying to get you to buy 100+ servers from them instead of their competitors, one of them might offer a free software upgrade for the CPUs as part of the deal, since it really doesn't cost anyone anything to do so... We've all seen deep discounts on software sales/licenses because their per-unit cost is nominally $0, now that model may be extended to hardware.
Of course the counter-point that comes to mind is IP-KVMs. If you've seen them being sold used for $20, that's because the hardware is useless without an ongoing subscription from the vendor. I suspect that only persists because IP-KVMs are too small of a market to attract the kind of effort needed to crack the mechanisms.
This won't save them money, it'll just extract more from us. It'll make upgrades easier, but at the expense of witholding things from the start. They'll still bin CPUs so they sell the top performers at top prices.
CPU manufacturing is already impossible to compete with. This, I believe, will give Intel too much power. They will be able to sell processors at a loss if they can remove features after the fact (make the money back in subscription after the "free trial") and undercut any possible competitor out of the market.
For example, Intel could offer, say Zhaoxin's level of performance for free for a short time, making sure companies like Zhaoxin never make into the consumer market.
This is a great move for Intel but terrible for the consumers.
It's not like they have not tried. At few years back in time, the market was flooded with cheap x86 tablets because Intel was pretty much handing out pallets of Bay Trail SoC for free to any willing manufacturer in an attempt to kick start an mobile ecosystem. Suffice to say it never got any traction.
Intel has a better story for not being stomped on via process than they did a year ago, but that chip still isn’t like on AWS.
Maybe get your shit together on being eaten alive on one side by aarch64 and Threadripper on the other before inventing some new way that what used to be called a nasty zero day is now a “feature”?
I’ll simply boycott Intel if they follow through with this. AMDs offerings have been far better value for some time now but Intel was always an option at a lower price point. Now it’s AMD or nothing, and so I think in fact this strategy gives AMD too much power.
That’s also a problem. I had high hopes for ‘free’ RISC-V alternatives while not really being a fan of the ISA, but Intel’s ‘foundary innovation’ chiplet program is totally unacceptable - because it keeps a company I simply don’t trust (ME) controlling the root of trust in silicon where the most desirable quality is the absence of exactly that.
I may end up using Ampere chips in spite of a distaste of ARM. I’m also seriously pursuing an OpenSPARC based SoC, with a test design through Skywater. At the latest process node SPARC V9 is plenty competitive and there’s a clear market for a high core count SoC absent of additional IP. I just need a modern memory controller. I’m going to document the process at silicon.engineering although that site is just a placeholder now.
What OS are you going to run on these chips? ARM has reasonable support, but SPARC is declining, for eg Debian only has an unofficial port, so no stable release, no security upgrades.
This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, as it feels potentially quite predatory.
I think this will almost certainly be used to either kill second hand processor sales (by either burning the processor to a given motherboard), or to allow Intel to double dip post sale, much like EA’s “project ten dollar” did with used video games.
Yup. Like Tesla, I am certain that extra features will not transfer during resale. If they already plan to lock us out of working hardware, you can be damn sure they plan to charge us for those same features every time that chip is resold.
Seriously, does anyone believe otherwise? This is straight out of the rent-seeking playbook.
We're going to end up using vetted RISC-V FPGAs, aren't we? It could be that there will be a significant speed / security divide that will only grow; not a fun world to live in, but one which might become a necessity.
Welcome Intel's patches for their planned use of the facility. Then welcome anyone else's patches that allow unplanned use of the facility; and tell Intel to piss up a rope when they whine about that.
My only real concern here is whether the manufacturer may be able to unilaterally _limit_ already-enabled hardware capabilities in the future. If they can do so without your express consent _at the time that the capability is downgraded_, well then one can fairly say that the capability is not owned. That would be tragic.
As usual, consumer-level customers are here complaining about the things they don't understand. Do any of you run a large 1,000+ core cluster? If not, please spare me your "middle fingers" and "bad taste in your mouth". This isn't going to affect your $500 Chromebook.
Intel is behaving as a monopolist, but they do not have a monopoly. This move will fail spectacularly because no one will be forced to adopt the feature, and the engineering effort going into software defined silicon is mostly waste of human capital.
This is really the beginning of the end then. This is the same route that IBM went before it’s failure in the business market with vendor lock-in and other nonsense. I had hoped that intel could recover but they don’t seem to want to.
So I saw a comment once which suggested all intel cpu's are the same and they just disable certain features before its sold.
So this article would make sense when thinking about the above comment, only instead of features being factory fused or disabled, they become a payable option which might be a one time fee or an option which can be switched on for a period of time.
From a recycling point of view, it would make sense, people dont have to throw away a computer or shelve it when they want to upgrade, but I cant help but think what about the realisation over time people may come to if this instruction set on/off service/rental/purchase becomes an option? Would that then harm intel or not if it became known that and would that spawn some new hacking interest in microcode or whatever it is that controls the enabling of different instruction sets?
> So I saw a comment once which suggested all intel cpu's are the same and they just disable certain features before its sold.
Really not true. What happens is that during manufacturing of a particular design, you get a distribution - not all units will have all features working. They analyze the data, and partition the units into segments based on (common) features that do work. Those on the tail end of the distribution (on the positive side) are the most featureful and sold with a premium. And so on from there.
If they actually tried to manufacture different CPUs for high and low end features, then each of those would have their own distributions, and they'd waste a lot of units for not meeting the spec. This way they can simplify the production and not waste the units.
Not saying they may not also do what the GP said, but from what I've heard most of it is my explanation. I think his comment is more applicable to the data center chips they make, and less for the consumer chips.
I'm interested in what the legal basis for this is. If someone found a way to circumvent the check (and presumably they will), what law would they be breaking by unlocking everything in sight?
Seeing only negative comments here, a bit of a counterpoint: I welcome this, if it means the sales price of the CPU will be significantly lower. This could be better than charging everyone a higher price, even for those who never touch the to-be-paywalled features.
Although it does depend on what kind of features are paywalled. I can see many ways how this could turn into a disaster for consumers.
Any feature that's a serious benefit for raw performance takes up serious area. At Intel's volumes, it's better to produce a different (and smaller) die for performance-based market segmentations.
Expect this to be used for features that are comparatively cheap in terms of area but valuable for enterprise. Virtualization features, ECC, that sort of thing.
This will slow the adoption of those features in software ecosystems since many developers still quite reasonably focus on stuff that works on their local machine.
Yep, Intel clearly hasn't learned a single thing from the disaster that has been price segmentation on features like AVX-512, the result is the vast majority of software never bothering to use it, because it can't be guaranteed to actually be present.
I'd argue exposing the IEEE 754 binary64 (aka f64; aka double) FMA unit's `((u52 * u52) & (1 << 51)) + u64` and `((u52 * u52) >> 52) + u64` (low half/high half, respectively) in the AVX-512IFMA instruction set was quite effective for the cost being comparatively cheap bypassing of exponent/sign handling and corresponding instruction decoder additions.
Note: these help for wide multiply, as needed most prominent by ed25519 and RSA. They do apply for "just" 256bit vectors using 4 lanes of 64bit (where multiplicands are just the low 52bits), without the AVX-512-typical clock penalty.
In similar spirit, it would have been nice to get emulated AVX-512 on AMD and Intel's E-cores, as it uses just one instruction to process twice the width, reducing the frontend throughout requirements. Also said AVX-512IFMA is rather nice, regardless of vector width.
Intel seems to be able to economically produce Core-series mainstream chips that contain huge but disabled AVX-512 units. I think the die area concern may not be so important.
True, that's quite a puzzling situation. It must be the case that the bean counters at Intel would prefer to have the reduced area for those products because it certainly affects margin.
Was Intel's design team really unable to make that happen at a reasonable cost? Were they trying to build a product that supports AVX-512 but failed? I wonder if we'll ever know.
Fully-functioning silicon being wasted on paywalled features. When there's a semiconductor shortage. It's a greedy and wasteful idea in any day and age, but right now it comes off as tone-deaf, too.
CPU binning (with fuses) already wastes “good” silicon. An i3 is just an i7 that wasn’t as good and had some features disabled. See also: the “silicon lottery” for more info. It’s been this way since the beginning. All this is doing is replacing unrepairable fuses with ones that can be disabled after the fact.
Theoretically, this is just giving you access to the features that would’ve been permanently fused off, but still good. Is it scummy? Yes. But is it wasting any more silicon than before? No.
The perverse incentives here seem a ton worse. There is direct incentive to be very aggressive with it, because even if they get the balance wrong they can adjust it later and employ all the marketing stuff done with software (50% off sale on vector math acceleration 2 days only!). It'll by definition always be used with features that the chips are fully capable of and thus even further pushes towards tiering capabilities without any connection to yield. The centralized control requirements moving further into underlying hardware are concerning as well from a redundancy and security perspective. I'm a big believer in businesses following the incentive tracks they create long term, for better and for worse. With this development, Intel's are diverging further from their customers'.
About the best that can be said is that at least the market now is a lot more competitive. Between Intel's fab woes, TSMC, AMD and both Arm and burgeoning RISC-V efforts, Intel is more on than I think they've been in a very long time. Maybe ever? Which does make it all the more curious to me why they're trying this now of all times. Seems like 5-7 years ago they'd have really has us. Now though it's just another thing in strong competitors favor. The end of a lot of core x86-64 patents is starting to kick off too. Or maybe Intel thinks this will let them do sticker prices that are drastically lower and thus look better vs AMD et al even as they can still extract more money in the end? It's worrying. In fact now that I think more on it, Intel weakening but using this brings its own extra worries. If they feel the need (or are forced) to juice returns for shareholders and themselves down the road if their competitiveness falters, or even if they regain dominance, they will have an installed base with a capability to squeeze it.