[ople]

Unsurprisingly IBM pioneered this with "Capacity on Demand" https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power9?topic=environment-capacit...

I'm guessing it has had some popularity among customers as it has been around at least for a decade.

[lobochrome]

It has been around far longer since this was one of the main ingredients of mainframe contracts (Variable Workload License Charges)

CoD was just the expansion to Power-based systems.

[Tuna-Fish]

Even before that.

The System/360 machines were typically leased, not sold. And the leases had different tiers for different clock speeds. If you decided you needed more power, you'd call up IBM, accept a more expensive contract, their service rep would show up, unlock a padlock on the machine, open a panel, turn a knob, close and lock the machine again, and leave.

[rbanffy]

Indeed it feels like that - Intel makes only one part, sells it at one price and, if you want to enable the dark silicon, you pay Intel for a key and the feature is enabled.

It's better than what they used to do, when they killed parts of the CPU to match the SKUs they needed to sell. At least you can pay Intel to enable things.