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VIA to Create Pentium 4 'Clone'
PyroMosh writes: "ZDNet is carrying a brief article about VIA's plans to start producing clones of the Pentium 4. VIA's already in legal trouble with Intel and it seems unlikley that this will go unchallenged by the chipmaking juggernaut. The Register is also covering this, and SiliconStrategies.com has an article with a bit more detail."
Didn't AMD do something similiar in reverse engineering Intel's chips? Anyone know what legal action came of that?
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"already in legal trouble with intel"
This is like calling a kickboxer a bad name and when he says "WHAT did you say" repeat it...
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
3Dnow.net links to the article at: http://www.theinquirer.net/19100103.htm that states that VIA denies this. Gotta love the opening paragraph.
To reverse engineer and duplicate a processor requires a superior understanding of processor design and construction.
Once you have reverse engineered the processor, why wouldn't you then put your resources into designing a better processor based on what you've learned, rather than wasting time making a clone?
How will VIA have a competitive advantage?
They will use substandard manufactoring processes, open chip plants in third world dictatorships, and provide less customer outreach and support.
Good!
Poor countries will get chipmaking infrastructure, and chip manufacturers will produce more cheaply. This part of the information economy is the part that can reach the poorest countries first; a factory job making chips is the first step towards participation in a western style net economy.
VIA won't advertise with idiotic pitches like the Blue Men. Perhaps it will take another tack -- selling to budget computer makers.
The chip cost is a big part of computer cost, so a cheaper chip will enable more companies to produce cheap computers, improving competition in this market sector.
This is like spurring a housing market with a revolution in pre-fabricated housing. It makes possibilities available to an entirely new group of potential buyers.
Goat sex free since 2001
Coming soon, Open Source hard drives. Does anyone have any spare beer coasters?
2GHZ lets see based on the cyrix methodaligies that would be something like 20 x 100mhz bus in real world standards that would be 13 x 33mhz bus. I wonder if this chip will retain the heat features. Imagine a chip running at 500 C. And they will be cheap just like thier ancestors. 25$ a chip so when it burns its self up in 3 months you go buy another. GOD I WANT ONE!
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Since intel is already hating on them for making a P4 chipset, and no mobo makers wanted to use it, VIA decided to make thier own motherboards, now this is just the next step why stop at making motherboards they are going to make the processors to go in them too.
It seems as if Via recognizes they will most likely be sued and be forced to forfeit some of their earnings if they clone Intel products. In the face of this, they also seem to feel that they can benefit enough to offset the losses caused by a lawsuit.
A similar incident occurred with John Deere and Caterpillar about 5 years ago. Caterpillar had figured out that using a rubber-tracked farm tractor gives farmers better yields. John Deere literally stole the concept and accepted the lawsuit because what they learned was so valuable it was worth it!
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
If P4 has been legitimately reverse-engineered, then VIA is beyond reproach. Typically, the companies who live by reverse-engineering go to great length to document the process. Of course, they'd have to pay hefty legal fees if that process is challenged in court, but for the giant like VIA this isn't much of a problem.
It depends on how they are defining clone. If it just runs the same code, thats one thing, if they reproduce proprietary chip disign techniques, thats another.
some would consider AMD a clone as well.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This has already been debunked as a rumor!
:)
Way to go slashdot....
http://www.theinquirer.net/19100103.htm - There's your linkified proof.
When IBM first brought out their PCs they were
"cloned". IBM brought on the lawsuits which
ultimately failed. The important word here is
"cloned" which has a different meaning then
"copied". Cloning attempts reproduce the
functionality of the cloned item by coming up
with their own design. "Copying" makes an exact
duplicate of the original, which of course would
be illegal. (eg. like selling copied software CDs)
Who wants a CPU that looks like a sheep
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
It seems from the article that all they are doing is making a chip that will be compatible with systems that are also compatible with the P4. All they mean by "P4 Clone" is that you can use it interchangeably with a P4. The only other similarity mentioned in the articles is the 18 stage pipeline, but there are so many ways of implementing such a pipeline that I doubt VIA's will be exactly the same. All in all, I say this is good competition, although it probably won't amount to much.
~ now you know
VIA can produce all the cpu it likes, I won't be buying any of them. If they still can't produce a stable motherboard chipset after years of research and practice, then how could they manage a completely functional x86 processor core ? I don't think they can do it well enough to chew into Intel.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
VIA bought the Cyrix name and it's hardly fair to characterize any product under that name as being inferior.
VIA probably chose to clone the Intel chips because they feel that they have a license to do so (it being the same license that they feel gives them the right to create the Intel P4 chipsets).
Why not go higher performance, like AMD? In addition to the Intel license issue, the fact is that a 1.5ghz AMD is viewed by the public as being less powerful than a 2.0ghz Intel part. People are stupid, they don't read benchmarks, and it's not likely to change.
The market for these would be people who are not already emotionally/contractually tied to Intel. This space is primarily held by AMD. Via is less likely to get any customers out of Intel. They are more likely to take customers from AMD.
Sure Intel will gripe, but if they're smart they'll let VIA in just enough to pound AMD.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Is already known to be highly saturated. Will VIA's chips be signifigantly cheaper than the Celrons or Durons (or at least have a better cost-to-performance ratio?) If so, will that margin be enough to keep the company afloat?
This sounds like something that would have been a great idea a year or two ago, but in this competitive (and now saturated) market, it will be tough going for the guys at VIA.
Many people these days don't seem to remember that far back (maybe I'm getting old), but for a long time, AMD (and in those days Cyrix was the other big one) *were* virtually exact clones (of 386/486 etc).
Its only *relatively* recently (three or four years ago?) that AMD decided to "fork" the design and start adding features of their own.
games are the only real application pushing chips into new speeds
This statement is inaccurate. It needs an extra word: "games are the only real application pushing mainstream chips into new speeds".
There are plenty of high-end applications (e.g. scientific visualisation, special effects, simulation, high-end servers etc, weather prediction/modelling etc) that have been pushing chips (and computers in general) to high speeds over the last 20 odd years, but not in a way that has been affordable to the consumer. The manufacturers of those systems make lots of money by selling those systems at extremely high prices. Games push companies to try make that level of functionality affordable to the man on the street, but games have never resulted in the actual creation of any of those technologies (the closest thing to innovation I can think of is programmable shaders on the GPU, but even that concept is very old, the only new thing is that its fast and its on the GPU; even the GPU concept was nothing new, it was only new to *mainstream* folk).
Side note, what is it with this slashdot "invalid form key" crap?
But even though they have improved it w/ low power consumption and general coolness, read those benchmarks.
But I, and many others, don't care. I want a laptop that runs for four hours or more per charge, doesn't give me second degree burns on my privates when I actually use it on my lap, and performs adequately for word processing, web browsing, etc. I don't need it to play Quake at 120fps. I have a machine at home for that.
Fot that reason, I think that VIA is hitting the nail on the head. People just don't need ghz-class machines to run Word, read mail, and surf the web.