End of Intel-Pin-Compatible CPUs?

sonamchauhan writes ""Intel, Via bury the hatchet" proclaims this news.com article. The settlement reportedly allows Via to build Intel-pin-compatible CPUs for three years more, but Via must cease pin-compatibility after that." This settlement apparently closes out 27 existing lawsuits.

Comments

Irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I have this feeling that Intel, like Microsoft, is going to become more and more irrelevant?

Re:Irrelevant

[intermodal]

because you are correct. Pentium 4 is a lousy chip, the pentium 3 not much better. Pentium II was the last truly respectable chip I have seen coming out of Intel. AMDs may run a bit hot, but their performance IMO is superior. Transmeta should make motherboards for "build yer own" types who want them. VIA has increasingly made more and more respectable chips as time goes on, and for cents on the dollar to the Intel CPU. The only thing keeping Pentium-line procs afloat is marketing at this point.

Re:Irrelevant

[intermodal]

I agree with you to a point, but i feel i should clarify. I have a pentium 4 and a pentium 4 Xeon at work. Both are sluggish and fail to meet my expectations consistently when I multitask heavily. However, before my wife switched to linux, her AMD with half the megahertz and half the RAM of my box at work ran considerably smoother, froze up less mid-task (not critical stopping freeze, several seconds of pause), and was over all a more pleasing computer. This may be due to the motherboard chipsets, but overall it has given me a very bad impression of the capability of the respective chips. Perhaps it is the motherboard chipsets, i know not. What I do know is that if my car, regardless of engine, cannot continually run as long as the engine is in order with fuel (or electricity), I will likely not buy another of that car.

Yes, i do think Intel plays the market. They play the market like a chump. And the market falls for it every time. I recall building my friend's box for her, and her mom was initially rather insistent upon a P4 until she found out that AMD was considerably cheaper and that the features of the P4 were not going to make enough of a difference for a box to write reports on for college. She ended up with rather than the $2000 machine that she had initially intended to buy her daughter, but a $1200 computer that surpassed the Pentium 4 she had been eyeing in every way for what she needed it for (more mhz, more ram, a few options she didnt even think of like a NIC, a modem, a cd burner, etc. all of which would have cost more than her initial 2k base price). So its not that the market doesnt care, its just that they dont know any better.

Most VIA cpus are in mini-itx's

[dtldl]

and so attatched to the board anyway, making pin compatibility a non-issue.

Intel Hate

[Bonker]

Man, I was so happy the day I bought an AMD-compatible mobo. AMD's are not, of course, pin-compatible with Intel. AMD is not a perfect angel, but they're a sight better than Intel, especially when you consider you can get the same power as an Intel chip in an AMD chip for typically half to one-third the price. It was a difficult choice to make since it meant forevermore sacrificing the resuability of intel processors motehrboards I already owned, but I'm glad I did.

My friends who retain Intel compatibility continue to pay top dollar for less power. If I think it's time for a cpu upgrade, I simply go to my local AMD redistributor and pay about the cost of two boxed games for a chip that is more than fast enough than anything I care to do with it.

Re:Intel Hate

[jkrise]

The opposite of Intel Hate is not AMD Love.... sometime back, Sanders - the chief of AMD, I believe, testified in support of MS in the anti-trust case. It was linked to the MS support of AMD's Hammer CPU, if I remember.

Intel's recent antics with the Centrino also point to darker designs. I'd rather prefer Intel had competition from Via, Cyrix etc. than from an unreliable AMD.

Re:Intel Hate

[Slime-dogg]

Yeah, similar experience here. I have an SiS mobo at home (fully integrated everything, very cheap). It's extremely upgradable though. It came with PC133 DIMM slots, as well as PC266 DDR-DRAM slots. I can upgrade the memory if I want, the processor, it has an AGP slot so I can do the video too.

Socket A is great. Does that kind of upgradability exist for say, the Pentium 2/3 socket? Can you stick a pentium 4 in a pentium 3 socket? No. I can stick a Barton or Mustang or T-bred or T-bird in a socket A. That's a range of 800Mhz to around 3 Ghz... all that's needed is probably a bios flash.

Lindows pcs

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the lindows pcs in wallmart uses the via c3 chips. Not exactly a fps gamers dream machine, but does make the machine very affordable. I think the desktops were about 200 dollars minus the monitor.

But, aside from the lower performing chip, it does it's job as a email/web browsing/messaging/word document editing/music playing home workstation.

Cheap solution for VIA

[mark-t]

No pin compatibility? Fine. Swap a small number of pins, and distribute that. VIA can make its chipsets and make motherboards for its new CPUs.

Of course, what's to stop some clever young upstart from being willing to raise his CPU off the board by an addition 3 to 4 mm, to place a special ceramic enclosure between the CPU and the board? This enclosure would do nothing more than swap the pins back (sorta like a null modem cable). Of course, this would probably also require a slightly different cooling solution, but at least it's doable.

And there you have it. VIA's chipsets can work with Intel's CPUS and Intel's chipsets can work with VIA's CPU's once again. All VIA has to do is *NOT* be the manufacturer of the conversion enclosure.

Re:Cheap solution for VIA

[The_K4]

You did read the part about the BUS needing to be different too didn't ya? If the FSB don't also change, they would be violating the agreement.

Re:Cheap solution for VIA

[haggar]

what's to stop some clever young upstart from being willing to raise his CPU off the board by an addition 3 to 4 mm, to place a special ceramic enclosure between the CPU and the board?

Totally terrible and unnecessary solution. If you swap a couple of pins on the CPU, you can simply have a BIOS setting where you select the CPU, and the circuitry on the motherboard will do the magic (provided that you chose pins that are not delay-sensitive, and you have plenty of such signals on a CPU). You could even have the mobo autodetect the CPU and do the re-routing automatically.

Of course, Intel would not ship a chipset capable of such re-routing, but all the other guys certainly would. VIA expecially.

Re:fr1st ps0t #2

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

you can't buy single Via processors anyway

I think you're mistaken

--

once again the consumer looses out

[jez_f]

Isn't this blatantly anti competitive. Not mercurially illegal but stifling competition.
If there were a standard chip/motherboard interface then you would be able to choose the chip that you want and the board that you want based on your preferences. Once this grace period is over (3 years) you will have less combinations available.
When are businesses going to realise open standards = growth.

Mind you I use mini-itx at home anyway so I shouldn't complain.

Re:once again the consumer looses out

[Jennifer Ever]

If there were a standard chip/motherboard interface then you would be able to choose the chip that you want and the board that you want based on your preferences.

Good lord. The chip is the board. I mean, look, once upon a time you had a relatively standard interface. Socket 5 (maybe earlier, too), Socket 7, and even Socket 370, to an extent. Standard interface, standard bus speeds, etc, because, for the most part, there was only really the one way to do things because nobody but Intel was in a position to dictate motherboard design. But the fact of the matter is, modern processors derive performance, value, and utility as much from chipset and bus design as they do from processor design. Via's CPUs largely suck on a regular Socket 370 motherboard, but they really do have certain advantages over anything else on the market when they're integrated into Via motherboards designed specifically for that processor.

Frankly, I'm happy to see the market going in different directions. I'm happy that AMD has broken away from producing clone chips for Intel motherboards and produced their own end-to-end solutions, forcing Intel to develop new technologies to compete. I'm happy that Via has carved out a niche for itself with the ITX market. You force a standard and you force us back to where we were a decade ago.

Re:Tualatin owned.

[Salamander]

VIA has been selling the CIII as part of the EPIA Mini-ITX platform

The CPU component of the Eden Platform is referred to as ESP. C3 is the name of a processor family that's sold quite separately from the Eden Platform; I have one in an SV24 at home. There's no doubt that the C3 and ESP are very similar technologically, but they really are different products packaged and marketed differently and I'm sure VIA would like to continue selling both.

Re:Via C3

[Big_Breaker]

Actually the off-die FPU was a full fledged 486DX CPU (ie with FPU unit) and installing it totally disabled the SX CPU.

OT: Centrino Linux Support

[asv108]

This is kinda off topic but related to Intel compatibility, all the centrino branded laptops are being sold with the Intel 2100 Pro mini-pci wireless adaptor. This adaptor does not currently work on Linux. Intel has announced tentative plans to support this adaptor on Linux. The are still deciding whether or not to release it as open source or binary only. Considering the large amount of laptops being sold with the 2100 Pro adaptor, I urge anyone, to contact Intel and let them know that you would like to see an open source wireless driver for linux, as soon as possible. You can also send them an e-mail too. We don't want this to turn in to another winmodem situation.

Related Link

[msaulters]

This Link gives a little info from the Centaur side of the issue.

Re:fr1st ps0t #2

[poot_rootbeer]

But if there isn't pin compatibility, then this means that you can't use one motherboard designed for Intel with a Via chip.

Unless...

Unless there were some kind of really simple adapter to go between the chip and the socket, that just does some pin remappings and maybe a little voltage conversion...

Re:fr1st ps0t #2

[apdt]

Why can't you have simple "plug'n play" processors? Then you'd have real competition among all the companies...any processor on any mobo!

The prolem is that that would require processors to use a standard interface to the chipset on the mobo, which they don't. There's no real open standard for one either. Besides when you start standardising, you nearly always end up compromising somewhere along the line, which will lead to a performance penalty, and I doubt anyone will go for it if that's the case.

See the forest?

[Erris]

The priciple, that Intel can keep others from pin compatibility, is important. Intel has done everyting in its power to avoid direct competition. They have changed their own pinout frequently and threatened others who would follow. AMD has had longer lasting pinouts! The result is 5 or 6 types of i386 motherboards. While, thankfully, instruction set compatibility has been maitained, there is less competition in the motherboard and chip market because of this. Oh well.

Re:fr1st ps0t #2

[Pharmboy]

I agree with you in theory, but the upgrade path for CPUs has never been very good anyway, unless you were making very minor upgrades. Assuming most people are like me, and don't consider a new cpu until the new is 2x the speed of the old, this has been a problem even if you stuck with Intel. Bought a 300, cant put a 600 in the slot(66 vs 100 bus), same with 400 / 800 coppermine, etc. The upgrade path for MOST people has always required a new motherboard, most of the time.

I personally like my ibm servers, which have a planer board. You upgrade the whole support chip/cpu/socket in one whack, without tearing out the whole system. Of course, its more expensive (and reminiscent of the old S100 bus Northstars ;) ) but it would be the easiest way to upgrade the cpu since the chipset features change so often. Or a similar system that makes leaves the pci slots (and all your adapters) alone.

But this is just my experience: Its easier to replace the whole motherboard anyway, unless you are only marginally upgrading the cpu. My GUESS is that the main reason there is no easy upgrade path for significant jumps in cpu speed is there is no one wanting to make it easy, rather, they want you to buy a whole new system.

Disagree: pin compatibility matters a lot

[Alderete]

Here's an annecdote. Earlier this year, I was building two new computers from components, for a new server and a desktop Linux system. I initially set out to make low-power, totally silent systems, based around the VIA C3 CPU.

But after doing research into cooling solutions, etc., I decided I could stand a tiny bit of noise, in exchange for greater processing power (I want to run Java web sites off the server box). So I upgraded the CPU to a Pentium III. This was possible, not just because the processors are opcode compatible, but because they were both Socket 370 compatible. Just swapped them out.

I would not have purchased an Intel CPU for the server system if I had made a commitment to a different socket format. So Intel would have lost.

More importantly, as a consumer, I won big time, by having a far more flexible system, that let me make an initial investment based on one set of requirements, and then upgrade the box later, when my requirements changed.

It's a shame that Intel doesn't want to keep this. After all, the C3 processor doesn't really compete with Intel's products -- there's quite a difference in processing power, at similar clock speeds. So let VIA have the low-power low end for us SilentPC enthusiasts, and own the rest. It's basic market segmentation, and Intel knows how to do that, profitably, very well.

3 years...

[Duncan3]

In all seriousness, in 3 years if things continue... falling prices, endusers not buying into the upgrade cycle, AMD and Intel undercutting each other, video cards outpacing CPU's...

3 years may be about the right time to bail from the PC (meaning intel) market and focus strictly on the exploding embedded markets...

The wild card: the S3/Sonicblue bus license

[MarkRH]

Frankly, I'm surprised that this entire story hasn't received more attention. On one hand, the premise of the story is correct--the terms of the license allow Via to develop its own pinouts and architecture, similar to AMD--that's Intel's intent in signing the deal, according to insiders at the company. The Via platform will indeed be a platform.

The most interesting bit in my mind, however, is what happens to this rogue bus license owned by S3. Recall that S3 Inc. signed a patent cross-license with Intel, then exited the graphics business, became Sonicblue, and sold off its assets to a joint venture with Via called S3 Graphics. That's why the current deal excludes S3 Graphics.

However, Sonicblue is also auctioning off its assets. That means there's going to be an Intel bus license up for grabs, possibly. However, as we wrote here, Sonicblue's legal team says the license can't be transferred without Intel's permission. That should make the auction more interesting, certainly...