Funnily enough, Intel tried something similar already in 2010 (way before their pay-as-you-go bullshit). It was a Pentium that you could unlock hyper-threading on for $50.

That model is here already for cloud computing, literally dollars for CPU cores and bandwidth and memory. But that only works out well for renting other people's servers and would be bad for any product that you purchase outright. I suggest we all not buy those products if they do that.

Pretty sure intel do something like that with their server CPUs.

I hope no execs are reading this thread because if they had these ideas they'd have no qualms about implementing them

This isn't unusual for Enterprise grade IT hardware. Mainframes have been sold/licensed that way for decades. I recently dealt with a performance issue that we solved by buying a license to use more of a piece of hardware that was already in our data center (we didn't realize the piece we owned had twice the capacity that could be unlocked just through licensing till we engaged the vendor)

Is that not what the K versions of their processors are? Pay more for the ability to overclock and get good speeds

Don’t give them ideas!