My go-to vendor’s business model is to do that for me. So I say, I want a DL360. I pick processors, ram, disk controllers from their stock. I can even tell them how many caddies I want (looking at you, Dell). And they ship me a build-to-order server from second-hand parts.

So in the future I’ll likely have a smaller bin of CPUs to choose from. If firmware keys get more specific than per-vendor, it could be potentially a very small bin. And small bins typically mean higher costs. The cheapest cpu is typically the biggest bin, not the highest specced.