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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.
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! :-)
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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.