Slashdot Mirror
Intel Attempts to Ban VIA Imports
aibrahim writes "CNET's News.com is reporting Intel's attempt to ban VIA chips and chipsets from U.S. import. This does not yet include, but may be extended to, VIA's Joshua processor.
The ban seems to be based on the violation of intellectual property agreements related to Intel's 'P6 bus.' " For more details on this case, read about their long-running legal battle.
Did you even read the article? Have you any clue whatsoever what is going on in this case? I realize you were trying to come across as a voice of reason, and you had to hurry to get in to the first ten posts to maximize your karma earnings, but this is ridiculous. Don't do that!
Via has a license to make chips that use the P6 core. They bought it from intel, who sold it thinking that Via couldn't or wouldn't do anything with it, and by selling it relieved ftc pressure somewhat.
Via could no more spin off a company to produce these chips than AMD could make Athlons which fit in the 820 motherboard. This isn't an ideological issue; via isn't at war with intel over some principle. Via Corporation is trying to make money, and Intel Corporation is trying to make money, and intc is suddenly realizing that they aren't as good at it as they used to be.
stoopid karma whore.
Please, think about what you say before you post. What you've said is absolutely laughable.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I can't beleive that anyone would think that its ok for a company to make an agreement with another company and then go back on it.
Or worse yet, deceive anti-trust investigators by licensing your technology to prove that there is competition and then revoking the license when the investigation is over. Then whining about how someone else competing in the chipset market with you. Damn. Some companies have a lot of nerve.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
http://www.asus.com.tw/Produ cts/Motherboard/index.html
Interestingly, when you click on the K7M / K7M-RM the cpu connection button bar adds "Slot A" as an entry. ;)
I have been on an AMD/Asus buying spree lately. I got my g/f an Asus P5A motherboard for her K6-2 and have built a webserver with K6-2 & Asus P5A. These machines have done quite well in relatively different applications - the webserver has been going non-stop for 243 days (running FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE), and my g/f's workstation doesn't have any hardware issues with its wealth of toys. Eg., Hauppauge WinTV 401, Buslogic Multimaster SCSI controlling a Plextor 40X Max CD-ROM (which utterly and completely rocks), and Yamaha 4416 SCSI CD-RW. For some reason the FIC PA-2013 the system had before was unhappy about having the Buslogic controller and IDE drives on the primary controller. Smooth sailing in all cases w/ the ASUS P5A, though.
Also, I'm currently in the specification stage for 2 rackmount Athlon servers. After dealing with vendors to get the Athlon machines set up, I can tell you - it is *not* easy to find higher-end configurations with Athlon. Fortunately, the good people at ASL, Inc. have been very helpful. In fact, they were the first vendor I saw meaningfully demonstrate Athlons (when I was lucky enough to attend Atlanta Linux Showcase last year). If you're looking to build an Athlon server, check them out. They're cool. Tell them ninjaz sent you. ;)
Can you imagine what this world will look like if Intel has the patent right for "a round thing"?
We wouldn't have wheels for our cars, we wouldn't have balls to play with, no ballbearings for industrial use, no hot air balloon festival (except the square or weird-shaped ones), no hoola-hoops, all waterpipes would be triangular or square shape, and so on.
While "patents" and "copyrights" do have their use, the way Intel is exercising their "rights" is not contributing to the world's intellectual richness. Conversely, the more Intel (and other companies) abusing the "patents" and "copyrights" laws to their selfish advantages, the poorer the world is going to be.
Count ourselves lucky, then, since they forget to file for the "a round thing" patent.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The real friction between Intel and VIA started when they announced the addition of PC-133 and DDR-SDRAM support to the chipset they had just licensed from Intel. This move greatly upset Intel because they were trying to convince the PC market in general to embrace the obscenely overpriced beast that is RDRAM. Via may or may not have had ( according to different sources) had a clause in their license dealing with supported cpu bus speeds. Meaning that Intel didn't want anyone else offering an increase in performance, well, atleast not before Intel offered one.
The problem was that Via already had chipsets that could run 133Mhz+, but they couldn't market those as anything other than 100Mhz chips. Then Intel missed some of the planned announcement dates for their 133Mhz FSB processors because of troubles with the i820 chipset( it was supposed to ship Q2 99) and Via got impatient and announced that their chipset had 133Mhz fsb, DDR-SDRAM, AGP4x support and more. That seemed to anger the lawsuit suits at intel and we are still watching the unfolding drama now.
Now if Intel did actually have a legal agreement that prevented Via from shipping a faster chipset and they broke the agreement, then I am on Intels side.
If Intel is just upset because Via has proven they have a product manufacturers want to buy over the i820, then Intel is just being infantile. That wouldn't excuse the lawsuits though. I do believe that this is the first time that a *major* product effort from Intel has been a *major* dud. This could just be a reaction to the rejection.
Double standard? I don't think so. Your opinion may differ.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Oh, calm down people. Intel can't tell another company to stop importing. It was probably blown out of proportion by another media hound looking for some sensationalized story. Even if they could ban VIA, they could just create another company, sell to them, rebrand the via chipset and sell *that*.
This complaint is all about the P6 bus. AMD is exempt from all this whining. They signed away their ability to be slot compatible with Intel for a license to MMX. The only way that this could ever affect AMD is if they turned around and made Slot 1 Athlons.
It is in fact fair, and legal, to be monopolistic. It's how you manage to obtain that monopoly that determines whether or not you have broken the law.
Definitely not off-topic. Crusoe is competing with Intel. Or going to attempt to anyway :)
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
If my memory serves me correctly then Intel repeatedly sued both AMD and Cyrix for stuff and it got into malicious prosecution countersuits.
And the Cyrix guys sad "Intel sued us five times, they never won"
If I remember correctly, the bit field instructions on the Motorola 68020 were also slower than shifting and masking. The index register instructions on the Zilog Z80 were so much slower than other instructions that they were pretty worthless.
Intel's designs are neither uniquely good nor uniquely bad. They're just successful and that makes them a popular target.
Furthermore, I will come out and claim that the Transmeta patents are much more detailed and specific and less obvious than something such as one-click shopping.
Patents have their place; Transmeta seems to be using the appropriately. Trademarks have their place; Linus seems to be using them appropriately. Other companies, such as Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, etoys.com, et. al. are abusing the system. If you read the article, did you see that Intel sued Cyrix 5 times? 5 times! And Cyrix was never even big competetion.
Got HTML? Want LaTeX? Try html2latex
- inexpensive
upgrade path. Joshua should be priced about where Celerons are today. Imagine 8x100.-- Terry
On some FIC motherboards (which I assume is what you're talking about), the floppy drive was disabled in the BIOS by default. There is two options you need to change in the setup program to enable it. With about 30 seconds, and a little knowledge, you probably would have been able to keep the motherboard you already had.
I admit this is kinda stupid. But it's not a quality program. It's just the defaults they selected in the setup program. And the person you bought the board from should have been smart enough to tell you that. But if you want to blame the chipset manufacturer, you're welcome to.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
This ban means we won't be seeing the VIA Athlon boards either. VIA can't import chips or mobos if Intel gets the injunction. VIA is the only major gun to not have a top-performing Athlon board out now. No VIA, no increased choice in boards, and we'll be using Irongate for another six-eight months.
.sig: Now legally binding!
You could care less about Transmeta. All you care about is your damn casino. Anyway, your argument doesn't make any sense because Transmeta is an American company and the Intel/VIA dispute is between an American company
/* Just try running Gimp with a 486. You too can experience the windows lock up type thing on linux */.
and an foreign company. So how could this have anything to do with Transmeta?
Well I don't think gambling is entertaining either but that's beside the point. If you can program something sophisticated in a popular web site (be it irritating like with a porn or a casino site) that at least says that it works for a few people.
The point that he is trying to make (I think) is that Intel feels quite threatened by the fact the a small time chip manufacturer may be taking away customers in another country. Their chips are "just too close to ours" or something like that. What we really must look at first is what kind of threat do they actually pose? Are these chips in wide production so that they actually make it to the USA and are there compelte systems that include these processors. Personally if these processors can run linux and they are in cheap systems that would knock about a couple hundred dollars off the price of a similar Intel machine then I just might be there. I am really getting tired of my useless computer and am looking for a replacement.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Usually, this sort of tactic would tend to imply that Intel is somewhat... afraid(?) of the unknown. Just my opinion :)
In business there is a whole field called Risk Assesment that goes into exactly what kind of risks there are out there and how a company is to look at those threats. Companies have lawyers because if they don't sue someone else will. Generally a new slightly similar chip in the marketplace that might challenge them would almost ceternally be a risk. Assessing the risk to the best of their ability is what being a good salesman/businessman/CEO is all about. Generally until they determine what the total risk picutre is they will use the lawyers as a measure to prevent problems.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Hmm, maybe Intel is learning. When AMD came along offering a comperable (if not better) product at cheaper pricing, Intel ignored it and hoped it would go away. -BIG MISTAKE-. Now that VIA is doing the same thing, maybe
Intel is figuring out that they should do something. Of course, trying to ban it may not be the best way...
Intel like Microsoft dosn't really need to care about anything. Technically inclined people use all the either better stuff or cheaper stuff and the rest of the world uses what is easily avaible. I would use whatever is cheapest and works well. I have used 3 computers in my home environment over my computing time and all three were Intel machines. This was not because I especially like Intel but because they were cheap and avaible at the time (since I needed a replacement). As long as it runs linux I am a happy person.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
(Greyfox is pissed off that he still can't get an SMP AMD Motherboard and his perception is that it's Intel's fault.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seriously... when your new motherboard doesn't recognize your FLOPPY DRIVE no matter which way you plug it in, and you take it back and buy a mobo made by someone else and the floppy works fine... that doesn't bode well for whoever made the dodgy motherboard. I've never spoken to anyone who felt anything but antipathy towards Via.
We'd only be upset by Transmeta defending their patents against an equally cool company.
Conveniently, there's only one Linus, so the existence of such a company is technically impossible.
Therefore, your argument is invalid.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
What we need to do is: make monopolies illegal, period. Patents to recoup investment? ok, but sell the shared patent rights to several competitors, full rights not licenses. Those companies would collectively collect all of the legitimate value of the patent away from substitute technologies, but would not be able to charge monopoly rents.
Hmm, maybe Intel is learning. When AMD came along offering a comperable (if not better) product at cheaper pricing, Intel ignored it and hoped it would go away. -BIG MISTAKE-. Now that VIA is doing the same thing, maybe Intel is figuring out that they should do something. Of course, trying to ban it may not be the best way...
kwsNI
While it maight be true that some instruction implementations are not the best possible, I would like to focus on the quality of it's chipsets. It's very difficult to check against SGI, Sun or Alpha chipsets, so I guess we are constrained to x86 comparison. And in that market, at least until BX they had the very best top of the line. If nothing else thay are the only ones who implement protocols flawlesslly. I mean, who could get an AGP to work perfectly on a VIA or ALi without disabling features (like X2 mode)? I had to switch to a Celeron when my k6 couldn't talk to my USB camera (BTW the Intel TX used it perfectly, but I needed 100Mhz FSB). No only that but their performance used to be stellar. Simply unreachable by the competitors. If you've seen benchmarks through Internet you'll see that the Apollo Pro with PC133 can't beat a BX with PC100. That's simply amazing. Until Intel launched the i740 they had the fastest, most compatible and flawless products. But then... i740 (horrid performance, no local memory texturing, though it was a high quality product), the first Celeron (16 Kb cache, horrid performante), the i810 (horrid performante and reliability issues), Rambus (questionable performance, outrageous cost, intent to corner the RAM market, the reason of all current problems), i810e (horrid performance), i820 (late, buggy, slow, expensive), Coppermine (late, buggy), i840 (expensive), SpeedStep (late), 800Mhz (vaporware) and the Itanium (brain dead, clumbsy, bloated, slow, expensive, late, late, late, etc.). So it may be true that the current offering is crap or dated (the venerable BX). But they have a history of delivering good products. Though I doubt they can keep up any longer
If someone decided to make something painfully similar to it and take it to market, would Slashdotters expect Transmeta not to protect their patents?
I would expect them to protect their patents. From looking at them, they really are innovative and novel.
Intel is trying to protect a monopoly of chipsets by claiming things like pin layout and a particular grouping of industry standard signaling protocols as intellectual property (and thus blocking interoperability). They have sued MANY companies many times, and lost them all so far.
If Transmeta did that, I know that I would contribute to the ruckus that might occur here.
Why is Intel obsessed with doing the same thing IBM tried to do with PC clone manufacturers? Even if they win, they'll lose. The only way to compete is to stay ahead, and you can't do that if you're obsessing over where everyone else is.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Intels spat is that they licensed their patented technology to VIA. VIA made changes that Intel disputed, so apparently, Intel has terminated their license, which means that VIA no longer has a legal right to use Intels patents.
With the license terminated, Via has nothing to sell to another company, because that company would then be violating Intels patents and could therefore not ship into the US, unless something gets overturned.
This is the same reason that US based PKI products use either Diffie Hellman or aquire a license from RSA. They can't just use an RSA implementation that was developed overseas and sell it here, because that would still violate RSA's original patent.
Expect to see a HUGE battle over this one. Via definetly is the ballsiest company to cross Intel's path in ages.
The last two yars Intel did all it could to avoid being marked a "monopoly", including licensing MMX and the P6 bus. Now that it's not called that, it can continue to compete "aggressively", which according to Intels playbook, includes revoking licenses it granted when it was under the DOJ's microscope.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Intel strong armed ASUS for the move, not it appears it wants to strike at the source. More reason to use non-intel hardware if you ask me. My MB is a Fic VA-503+, via chipset and my CPU is an AMD K6-2/400. To hell with Intel!
-- DuckWing
"Intel sued Cyrix five times, and they never won," he said. "Intel--they just love lawsuits."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree. This is pure anti-competitive bullshit. Intel has never actually proven any IP violations by VIA, so they have no legitimate cause for banning import. I think the motivation for this could be that VIA is the main third party manufacturer for Athlon chipsets, as well as 133 Mhz Aluminummine chipsets. Intel likes to have a stranglehold on the high end of the market. If they can't win by competing fairly, they just try to cut off the supply of competitors' products.
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
Now if Intel did actually have a legal agreement that prevented Via from shipping a faster chipset and they broke the agreement, then I am on Intels side.
From my limited understanding, there was no such agreement as such, but the lack of one. Intel has patented the 133Mhz FSB format as well as 4X AGP format, and had NOT cross-licensed these with VIA. VIA then cooperated with National Semiconductor (which did have the correct licenses from Intel) to manufacture the chip set. Intel is upset because these two small competitors pooled their respective Intel licenses. In my uneducated opinion, if intel is going to micromanage the lives of their licensees, I don't see why they made the agreements in the first place.
This article refers to VIA's ploy with Nat Semi. And this one tells of a similar situation, this time between Acer and Nat Semi. "Not a valid loophole," says an Intel's top legal ballbuster, referring to the co-operation between its rivals. But that's up to the court to decide, and I'll bet that VIA's mantra is going to be "monopoly-monopoly-monopoly"
I'm cool like a fool in a swimming p-p-pfft-pool
It seems very much like Intel are performing a few MS-like maneouvers of their own here. Obviously if a licensing agreement was made, then that should be enforceable, but to me it seems that they're just using that legal excuse (and corporate weight) to prevent competition.
Isn't that more or less what MS stand accused of doing??!
I mean, it would make sense if VIA, AMD and the like were producing inferior copies that harmed the reputation of the computer industry, holding back performance, or if they were using Intel's trademark, but they're not. They actually seem to be able to produce better product, faster and cheaper. Consumers and users aren't being harmed here, just Intel's profit margin.
Why is it that when big companies are outdone in the innovation field, they always resort to bring legal powers to bear on the smaller firms, thus harming the very innovation they're trying to promote. If Intel took this attitude 6 years ago, we'd probably be using 486's still!
If I were them, I'd stop spending all this money and lawsuits and spend SERIOUS amounts of money on R&D. They're just going to get left behind otherwise.
Just my opinion.......
- "How do we do it? Volume!" - The Bursar of Unseen University.
They can't touch transmeta. Reason being that transmeta is having IBM fab the chips. IBM and Intel have a cross license that pretty much makes it possible for IBM to make an exact clone of a PIII chip and sell it. To ward off Anti-trust fears Intel did a number of these agreements with large vendors. The idea being that, while IBM has some of the best fab facilities in the world they can't d it as cheaply as Intel. And in this cut throat market nobody is going ot pay more for the CPU than they have to.
Most of the six law suits that Intel failed to prevail against Cryix were based on the fact that some of the production was fabed by IBM.
This brings up the interesting point of how much of a leg does VIA have to stand on? The VIA PR guy claims that Intel never won against Cryix so they aren't worried. But this case is different. I would wager that VIA's key point will be based on if the license agreement is really terminated because Intel said so?
On the bright site I would not be suprised to see the OEM's that via is sending chips to here in the states file with the court on behalf of VIA. They will get just as hurt as Via if Intel prevails.
Now that somebody has come along and actually started competing with them, they just can't handle. It makes me wonder the hell they're gonna try to do to transmeta!
Back in the early 1980's a new fad started in the US. People got their BS in engineering and went straight for an MBA. Then they graduated, and got directly onto the fast track. They never really worked in the trenches, at least not beyond some probationary period, and certainly not putting their heart into it.
Now these people are 'Captains of the industry', and you know what? They're not really comfortable with the underlying technology they're in charge of. They're much more comfortable with business.
As a result, technical competition has been fading during the '90s, and business competition has moved in. Companies don't want to get your business by producing the best products and giving the best service for the price. They want you to have to use their products and services, at their price, because there is no other choice.
This is really what Linux is about. Frustrated tekkies who want to do their best, but are barred by 'business concerns' into mediocre solutions. It began with software, because there was already some appropriate history there, and it is cheap to enter and build on that history. It will be interesting to see where else the paradigm works.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
For ages they've just had terrible designs of their chips. You can actually write software replacements for many of their opcodes that exactly duplicate the function of an opcode but run faster.
I remember that on the original Pentium, it was faster to implement a bit scan (first bit set from one edge) with shifts and masks than to use the BSR or BSL opcodes. Not in some clever way either, but just a standard binary search. This elementary problem could be done by a bright second year engineering student to work in one or two cycles with maybe a hundred gates.
There's just no excuse for that. It's not hard to to implement an opcode so that it just runs a sequence of other opcodes, and it wouldn't have taken much surface at all to be able to bitscan in one cycle.
Say what you like about the quality of Intel products, but their attitude is appalling. They signed a deal with VIA to deflect the monopoly investigation they were under, and then they got pissed off because VIA made a better chipset.
This basically says that Intel wants a monopoly on chipsets. If this injunction is granted, then they will have succeeded in their aims. I think that the Federal Trade Commission should be called in to reinvestigate Intel _because_ of their behaviour towards competitors.
It is fair to be competitive, but not to be monopolistic, and then cover that up by licensing their chipset to a competitor so they can say, "look, we are good boys, we allow comptetition" and then rescind the license a few months later when they aren't being investigated.
Luckily this won't affect the AMD chipsets, so expect to see even more choice in Athlon chipsets soon.
I don't like bully-boy corporations. Lack of competition means less innovation in the market. Intel has a huge share of the chipset and motherboard market as it is.
I doubt that the companies using VIA chipsets (Compaq et al) will be too happy. Expect them to react and go 100% Athlon if this attempt to ban VIA works. If they cave into Intel and switch to Intel chipsets then I have no respect for them! :-)
~~
You know, they used to be much more subtle in their maneuvering, basically when the competition was so inept that they couldn't find their own asses. Now that AMD finally has a winner (Athlon) and they're getting better than expected earnings (high expected was ~26 cents/share, turns out to be more like 46) Intel's starting to get desperate.
Despite the spread of the Athlon, VIA's bread and butter in the PC industry is still the P6/PPro/P2/Celeron/whatever it's called this week market. Intel is trying to strangle all the competitors out of this market - witness the copyrighted P6 bus preventing competitors from breaking into Intel's market...
InThane
Slashdot poster 'kinesis' has said he will no longer allow the import of any Intel products into his apartment and that he will sue any and all parties necessary to enforce the import ban.
In a prepared statement, kinesis said, "Those guys suck!"
An approximately 960 square foot area of Northern California is affected by the ban.