Back in 2021 on Phoronix was first to report on Intel preparing Linux patches for a “Software Defined Silicon” feature for activating extra licensed hardware features. That Software Defined Silicon support continued moving forward and was then announced as Intel On Demand with a focus on users being able to pay to activate additional accelerators found on select SKUs but not enabled by default.
This pay-to-use model for accelerator IPs already found in the Xeon processors was widely panned. The Intel On Demand allowed for paying to use it on a consumption model or a one-time feature activation.
We haven’t heard much from Intel around On Demand in the past year or two but it looks like now they are sunsetting the controversial feature.
While writing this morning about the latest QATlib update for QuickAssist Technology, On Demand / SDSi came to mind and realizing I hadn’t heard anything about it recently nor saw any new software updates for it even with my frequent Linux / open-source monitoring…
Making for an extremely exciting Sunday morning was finding out that the Intel SDSi GitHub project has been archived.
Back in November they archived the Intel SDSi GitHub project that was used for supporting Intel On Demand. With that said paired with them not talking about it much at all in the past year or two, it looks like this concept is being eliminated moving forward. The other Intel On Demand web pages were also taken down with just some old PDFs coming up for On Demand via the Intel site.
