> " Somebody should be tarred and feathered for introducing the idea that features should be fused off for all but the highest paying customers. If the customer is not paying for the fused off functionality, the shareholders are."
This is very well put.
While I've always understood the economic motivation for margin optimization and the technical reality that CPU wafers aren't very granular, fundamentally, it's a long-term losing idea to intentionally fab gates that don't add end-user value. While it may work in the shorter-term, when it becomes the plan of record (as opposed to fixing a one-gen design or product mix error) it signals a shift to prioritizing value extraction over value creation.