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Intel and Skype Exclude AMD
Raenex writes "CNET is reporting that Intel and Skype have signed an exclusive deal that would cap the number of conference call members on all but Intel architecture. Skype will only offer 10-way conference calls on specific Intel chips while other chips, including all AMD chips, will only offer 5-way conference calls. From the article: 'Though few would argue that a niche feature like that is going to be a deal breaker for most PC buyers, the importance of the Skype-Intel alliance goes well beyond VoIP conferencing. Indeed, it's the latest, and certainly most prominent, example of Intel's new take on marketing: Lock in software partners as well as the PC makers.'"
To allow more conference calls to users who are using a specific CPU is a cheap shot at the market. It's not fair to chip makers, and definetly not fair to the consumers.
Gatta start watchin Intel's sucker punches.
google.slashdot
Heh... In five years Skype is going to be as relavant as Napster is today: a historial footnote to a great idea that could have been much more. The dot-bomb hangover is finally fading and there's a resurging interest in funding Internet-based technologies. Some people have called it a "new boom". VoIP is far and away the biggest reason for this new boom. New VoIP providers are coming out the woodwork because the industry finally matured enough to standardize on SIP as the defacto VoIP-standard. Vendors are cranking out interoperable SIP hardware, which allows us (as part of a recent VoIP startup) to rapidly roll out services without having to second guess whether we're using the right tech. Open standards makes things cheaper. It makes it easier to find, hire and train knowledgable engineers. Etc, etc... Skype, however, is still locked into a propietary protocol. Compare the history of the CD to that of the Minidisc to see difference that open standards makes. Like Napster, the only value of Skype in five years will be the brand name.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Cisco has a good start on them though - but not the software, that's Skype.
This is going to be an interesting field to watch for the next five years.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Whatever the merits of AMD's existing anti-trust complaints, there is no freaking way this isn't an anti-trust violation. It's completely artificial and a clear loss to consumers. Seems odd that Intel would voluntarily give out ammunition like this.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Stick to open source telephony. Asterisk makes an excellent enterprise grade open-source PBX for the back end. For the end user, Free World Dialup offers a SIP compatible service with a free downloadable client that does not limit you like this.
Black Invention Myths
does this mean Intel is actually actively trying to chase off all the geek customers that were just starting to consider not despising them again when the Yonah benchmarks came in? or did some middle-manager just accidentally outsource their public relations to Sony?
No, I wouldn't avoid buying a PC with an AMD chip. I pretty much buy all AMD now, and I plan to continue. I would, however, be sure to not use software that tries to dictate to me what type of hardware I use. I wonder if this will backfire on Skype?
Asterisk.
It does conference calls really well and is not just free as in beer.
Corporate stupidity isn't always a bad thing. It's just a matter of letting them shoot themselves in the foot and then reaping the benefits of their pain.
MTW
It only opens the door for Skype's competitors to gain a foothold by not instituting such a silly restriction.
It also turns into bad PR for Skype for the tech community to find out that Skype intentionally hobbles their software.
Ok, if we are going to have anti-trust laws on the books, now would be a perfect time to use them. If this isn't anti-competitive behaviour then let he who holds that position define what is.
This is on a par with Ford and Exxon agreeing that unless you are burning Exxon gas your Ford's engine will be capped at half it's rated horsepower.
Democrat delenda est
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
eBay knows product marketing
How? eBay is a service company. The only marketing I've seen is singing about buying crap off of eBay on TV and every single noun that I search for on Google, I can buy on eBay as well.
Back on topic, this is a _very_ bad move on Intel and Skype. I doubt that MS would even stoop so low.
A) Why would Skype agree to this? What is their benefit by limiting their customer base by splitting hairs on commodity CPU manufacturers?
b) Why would Intel do this when they are already being sued by AMD?
Is Sony involved in these decisions?
It's the sign of a company that is falling behind in their core markets.
Skype already takes extreme measures to prevent reverse engineering and to abend the application if you try to run it under a debugger.
So does World of Warcraft, but people still hack it from time to time. Up until now there hasn't been much of a reason for anyone to want to modify Skype, so it hasn't been in the crosshairs of the reverse engineering crowd.
Example: Attaching a normal windows debugger or using softice isn't the only way to trace execution. Even if the app attempts to detect a virtualized CPU (say vmware), a full emulator can be completely invisible -- just slower. qemu even supports a gdb socket connection.
Trying to prevent reverse-engineering is a never-ending arms race and I'm not sure Skype has the will to stick it out. Just witness sites like game copy world to see how effect anti-reverse-engineering technologies are.
If you actually read the article, as part of the deal, Intel plans to optimize the code for their processor. Intel is paying money to optimize the third-party Skype code for their chips, presumably utilizing SSE3. Though, I don't know why the deal extends to Duo chips only - I could understand if Intel had to optimize the code to efficiently utilize Hyper Threading, but Duo chips have two discrete cores; perhaps they're taking the shared cache into account, but AMD's dual core chips have a shared cache too.
If the code were optimized for SSE3, it would only run on recent Intel chips to begin with. I did not read anywhere in the article that said Intel paid to exclude AMD from approaching Skype to optimize their code for "AMD64" (x86-64). That said, the number of phone calls allowable should really be licensed on a per-CPU/core basis. If Skype honestly believes that Intel Duo chips with Intel's optimizations are truly twice as efficient as AMD's dual core chips, a license for 10 calls should be available for quad core AMD products. I have never been a fan of licensing by the number of CPUs, specifically disabling features if a host machine has fewer than X processors, but it has been in use for years.
It's absurd to assume that a machine with fewer than X processors/cores or of a slightly different architecture is not/will not be powerful enough to run suchandsuch a feature within a product's lifespan. They said that the exclusive 10-way calling feature will only be exclusive for a limited time, however. It may be in recognition that AMD64 chips will eventually be able to outperform even SSE3 optimized Intel code, if they cannot already.
How hard would it be to create a dll that overrides getCPUId() and put that in front of skype's library path.
This really seems like a foolish way to conduct business.
"We don't offer you more, but we beat our competitors down with a stick so they offer you less"
-Nuke the moon
Consider how this may have happened:
An Intel marketing person thought this was a good idea. He is one of those who knows nothing about technical things; he's just a marketing drone. What could he possibly do to advance the strength of his company? Nothing. So, to pretend that he was contributing he turned to evil. He made a deal that looks good to other know-nothings like himself, and is really, really offensive to the people who matter.
This is a violation of the anti-trust laws, I think.
New Intel mottos:
Intel: When you can't compete, be adversarial.
Intel: We're on the way down.
Intel: A technical company controlled by people with no technical knowledge.
Intel's present adversarial behavior is part of a gradual decay of the company that is more than 10 years old, in my experience. Perhaps 10 years ago, Intel arranged a pay cut for employees just before they began to do record business. During that time, Intel has done some really, really disgusting things, like trash their consumer products division by not paying enough attention to it.