NVIDIA Responds To Intel Suit

MojoKid writes "NVIDIA and Intel have always had an interesting relationship, consisting of a dash of mutual respect and a whole lot of under-the-collar disdain. And with situations such as these, it's easy to understand why. NVIDIA today has come forward with a response to a recent Intel court filing in which Intel alleges that the 'four-year-old chipset license agreement the companies signed does not extend to Intel's future generation CPUs with "integrated" memory controllers, such as Nehalem. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, had this to say about the whole ordeal: 'We are confident that our license, as negotiated, applies. At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.'"

Comments

Decaying CPU business?

[Libertarian001]

WTF? Does Intel sell more CPUs than NVIDIA sells GPUs?

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[0123456]

WTF? Does Intel sell more CPUs than NVIDIA sells GPUs?

Doesn't Intel sell more GPUs (admittedly crappy integrated ones) than Nvidia does?

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Jthon]

Define sell. If you mean bundle for virtually free with CPU's (or in some cases cheaper than just a CPU, go Monopoly) then yes they do.

If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs.

In fact they count sales of chipsets with integrated graphics as a graphics sale for market share even if that computer also has a discrete graphics card. So if you buy something with an NVIDIA or ATI card and a 945G chipset that counts as graphics sale for Intel even though the graphics chip is never used.

Their integrated graphics actually benchmarks slower than Microsoft's Software DirectX10 implementation (running on a Core i7). If people were more aware of just how poorly Intel integrated chips were they'd probably sell even less.

Sadly, most people aren't aware of the vast difference in performance, and just assume their computer is slow when Aero, The Sims, Spore or Google Earth run poorly.

Until Intel ships Larrabee we won't really know if they can ship a GPU, and that looks to be still over a year away.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[_avs_007]

Not everybody particularly cares about 3D graphics performance. If you ask the common joe, they probably care more about video performance than 3D performance, as people typically watch videos on their PCs more often than play 3D games.

With that being said, Intel Integrated Graphics tend to do quite well with video, especially HD Video, rendering.

Somebody that cares about 3D graphics performance, because they want to play the latest and greatest games, is going to buy discrete graphics regardless, doesn't matter if the integrated graphics is made by nVidia, ATI, etc.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Jthon]

If you're looking for accelerated MPEG4 and HD video playback you won't find that on the Intel board. While they support XvMC fairly well that only does MPEG2.

Last month they released some drivers for the VA-API but that's in their closed source binary blob driver which works very poorly on Linux.

NVIDIA has VDPAU support which will already allow you to play back HD streams without having to fork over for a more expensive, and hotter running CPU.

Phoronix has several Articles about this:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=xorg_vdpau_vaapi&num=1

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_vdpau&num=1

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Klintus Fang]

It is not about bundling. It is about the fact that the vast majority of PC sales are to business customers who want to put desktops under the desks of their employees and don't give a damn about the GPU performance. To those customers, spending the premium for an nVidia GPU is absurd. Hence, they buy inexpensive machines that have GPU's which suck at rendering 3D but are fully functional when it comes to running Office or Email applications. This, btw, is in my opinion the real reason AMD bought ATI. AMD wanted to work toward having a solution for that high volume market, and seemed to think they needed to own ATI to do it.

Many of the people who put together high end machines for gaming and/or other 3D application purposes---the people that buy and value what nVidia has to offer---frequently forget that type of machines they love are a very tiny percentage of the desktop market...

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Jthon]

Yea, and then ask more clued up friends why a game they just got runs like crap. Just because they don't care does not mean they don't use it.

That's exactly what I was getting at. I have friends who aren't die hard gamers who have no idea what a GPU is. But they still like to play games occasionally.

They go out and buy games like The Sims 2, Spore, or even World of Warcraft (yeah casual people play this) and get frustrated that it runs so poorly.

I hate to tell them that because they have a low end Intel integrated chip they're just screwed (especially friends with laptops where an upgrade is unheard of). Heck even the lowest end NVIDIA or ATI INTEGRATED chip is over 10 times faster than Intel, and honestly costs only a couple $ more.

Sure the NVIDIA/ATI integrated GPUs aren't top of the line, but at least with those the game is playable. I know someone who was trying to play some games on their Intel chipset and textures and some other affects are just missing.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[GigaplexNZ]

If you mean as an actual product someone would intentionally seek out then Intel sells 0 GPUs.

I actively seek out Intel graphics when looking at laptops due to the lower power requirements and better driver support (I hate it when NVIDIA and ATI drivers don't install in Windows as I have to contact the OEM for an older version, and I've always had more issues with the same brands on Linux). I know the performance is abysmal in comparison, but I don't care. You don't want Intel graphics, that's fine and I understand why, but that doesn't mean no-one intentionally seeks them out.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Jthon]

NVIDIA has their laptop drivers on their website so you no longer have to get outdated ones from your OEM. (Took them long enough.)

As for battery life, have you checked out NVIDIA integrated vs Intel integrated? The discrete systems do suck more power, but I think the integrated chips for NVIDIA/ATI are still better and don't consume more power than Intel integrated.

Apple is picky about battery life, and they recently switched to all NVIDIA on their laptop line, including the Macbook Air.

Don't just assume that because it's NVIDIA it's a power hungry monster. Sure the high end graphics cards need their own power substation, but they can do some nice low power stuff when they need to (9400M, Tegra).

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Jthon]

It's not just about games, there are business uses for GPU acceleration. Presentation software could use the GPU to be more dynamic, and render complicated graphs more smoothly. Some complicated PowerPoint presentations get slow, why not use a GPU to accelerate this?

Perhaps Excel or Matlab could use a GPU to crunch numbers to speed up calculations. Or even use the GPU to make the charts more interactive.

Perhaps MS has some overhaul to their display system which would allow it to use the GPU to render Word documents with better anti-aliasing and allow large documents to scroll faster. Adobe Acrobat actually supports some GPU acceleration (not on be default I think) which makes PDFs render faster. I know turning on PDF acceleration actually makes me more productive since I can read documents without having to wait for redraw.

Maybe we can do GPU accelerated vector graphics, for web site and UI rendering. Who knows what could be done to improve the business experience if the option is there.

NVIDIA expects to change the way people USE the GPU so it's NOT just for rendering 3D pictures anymore.

Some improvements to business experience might be small, but still give a small boost in productivity.

All that said, there will always be people who just use a very basic word processor. But these people also don't need Intel's next Core i7 quad mega CPU either. They'll be fine with their P2 running Window 95 if the hardware didn't eventually break down.

The whole point is that NVIDIA wants to innovate on the GPU so that business, and people can use it in new ways to do stuff they couldn't before. Intel wants to do the same, but require you to buy a bigger CPU. Instead you could get a cheap integrated GPU and CPU combo, and get the same productivity boost you were getting by buying just a bigger CPU before.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[Jthon]

There's more to GPU acceleration than gaming.

What does your wife do? Does she just send e-mail? Then beyond some UI improvements there's not much for her (but those UI improvements could be cool).

Does she encode music or video's for an iPod? That can be enhanced with the GPU. You can encode movies in faster than realtime on current GPUs. Something you can't do with current CPUs.

Does she watch YouTube? I saw a demo of a program that runs some fancy filters using the GPU on low quality YouTube like video, and spits out something that looks pretty good. It was something that couldn't be done in real time on a CPU but a mid to low range GPU could do.

Does she do graphic design? Features like the new Photoshop allow the program to be much more responsive when editing images, large filters also complete in fractions of a second.

In the simplest cases a better GPU might increase UI responsiveness, and make the experience "smoother". But long term changes will likely change WHAT you do with the GPU.

NVIDIA at least is trying to change it so GPU acceleration isn't just about gaming. They want the GPU to be a massively parallel processor that your desktop uses when it needs more processing power.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[GigaplexNZ]

NVIDIA has their laptop drivers on their website so you no longer have to get outdated ones from your OEM. (Took them long enough.)

Only for some models. My old 6600 Go (a very powerful laptop chip for its time) is still unsupported.

As for battery life, have you checked out NVIDIA integrated vs Intel integrated? The discrete systems do suck more power, but I think the integrated chips for NVIDIA/ATI are still better and don't consume more power than Intel integrated.

I have, and they aren't particularly appealing. Their performance isn't sufficiently better such that I can perform tasks that I otherwise wouldn't be able to, so the gains are effectively worthless to me. The driver support isn't fixed switching to NVIDIA/ATI integrated either (and is sometimes worse). Battery life is probably comparable, but it would need to be clearly superior for me to consider them.

Don't just assume that because it's NVIDIA it's a power hungry monster. Sure the high end graphics cards need their own power substation, but they can do some nice low power stuff when they need to (9400M, Tegra).

I don't assume that, but from what information I have gathered I feel the Intel chips are currently a better fit for my requirements.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[walshy007]

Also available is 9500GT in low profile form factor, have one here in my media pc, that's about as high end you can get with that form factor from what I've seen.

Re:Decaying CPU business?

[iamhigh]

If the CPU dies and the GPU takes over, can't we just rename the GPU a CPU? You know since it will be the "Central" Processing Unit?

Creative Labs?

[DigiShaman]

What's next, Creative starts bitching too because their APUs (Audio Processing Unit) are being snuffed out by nVidia and Intel?

Hey you two, STFU. Your technologies are forever joined at the hip in modern computing. Stop the bitch slapping and grow up.

What's my line?

[Ostracus]

"At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.""

Sounds like he reads slashdot.

Re:What's my line?

[theheadlessrabbit]

"At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.""

Sounds like he reads slashdot.

it sounds more like he NEVER reads slashdot.
He said nothing about welcoming overlords, Natalie Portman, or hot grits. the phrase IANAL never came up, and no car analogies were used.
how does he sound like a slashdotter?

I think they mean "decaying" margins

[Anonymous Coward]

By locking all competitors out of the chipset business, a company can boost margins (and thus boost profit), as opposed to living with decaying margins and lower profitability due to commoditization.

As standalone CPUs get commoditized, the margins and profitability decay.

Also if you sell crappy integrated GPUs, you can protect the GPUs from competition and the CPUs from commoditization by bundling them and locking out competitors.

Intel didn't get to where they are today by not knowing how to play the game. They wouldn't be walking away from their standalone CPU business and move to integrated CPU/GPU if they didn't think their old standalone CPU business would suffer from decaying margins. As they move into this space, it also only makes sense to try to put up barriers to your competitors who might be trying to screw up your future business strategy. Remember how Intel made AMD go try and execute "SlotA" when before they made pin-compatible chips. This is seems like a very similar strategy to try to kick Nvidia out of the Intel eco-system.

Typical bluster

[CajunArson]

Jen-Hsun Huang has never been one to keep his trap shut when given the chance... even though Nvidia is in the red right now. Lesson one: When a CEO comes out and tries to use a legal dispute related to a contract as a pulpit to make a religious sermon, he knows he's wrong. See Darl McBride and Hector Ruiz as other examples of dumbass CEO's who love to see themselves in magazines but don't want to be bothered with pesky details like turning a profit or actually competing.
    Intel is #1 in graphics when it comes to shipments... now I'm not saying I'd want to play 3D games on their chips, but guess what: despite what you see on Slashdot, very few users want to play these games. Further, I've got the crappy Intel integrated graphics on my laptop, and Kubuntu with KDE 4.2 is running quite well thanks to the 100% open source drivers that Intel has had it's own employees working on for several years. I'm not saying Intel graphics will play Crysis, but they do get the job done without binary blobs.
    Turning the tables on Huang, the real "fear" here is of Larrabee... this bad-boy is not going to even require "drivers" in the conventional sense, it will be an open stripped-down x86 chip designed for massive SIMD and parallelism... imagine what the Linux developers will be able to do with that not only in graphics but for GPGPU using OpenCL. Will it necessarily be faster than the top-end Nvidia chips? Probably not... but it could mean the end of Nvidia's proprietary driver blobs for most Linux users who can get good performance AND an open architecture... THAT is what scares Nvidia.

Re:Typical bluster

[CajunArson]

I hate to respond to myself but: Yeah the market share of Linux is not huge, Nvidia is probably not terrified of losing sales to Larrabee on some desktop Linux boxes (high end supercomputing apps could be an interesting niche they might care about though). However, it is afraid that OEMs will be interested in Larrabee as a discrete card where Intel never had a solution before. Given the problems that Nvidia has had with execution over the last year, and the fact that Intel knows how to keep suppliers happy, THAT is where Nvidia is really afraid.

Decaying Matrox business?

[Ostracus]

"This, btw, is in my opinion the real reason AMD bought ATI. AMD wanted to work toward having a solution for that high volume market, and seemed to think they needed to own ATI to do it."

I think you're partially right. If they indeed wanted entry into the business graphics market. Matrox would have been a better purchase. But ATI makes better GPUs and they wanted entry there as well. It's easier to scale down a high-end GPU than it is to raise up a low-end GPU.

Re:Decaying Matrox business?

[Klintus Fang]

I agree. AMD likely wants generic "platform" solutions (where they provide the customer with multiple components of the platfrom rather than just the CPU) for as many markets as they can hit rather than just the basic business segment. That probably is why they chose ATI as opposed to something cheaper.

Re:Huang Knows His Stuff

[Louis Savain]

Not just any single chip but a homogeneous multicore processor, that is, one that has multiple processing cores. There is difference between a CPU and a multicore processor.

Re:DX10? That Vista thing?

[Jthon]

Dude. Even I know GPUs are optimised for compositing. Ray tracing is a way different thing. It has to have a way different system. Pretending it doesn't will not help you here.

You didn't just write the above did you? You show your ignorance. A long time ago they did just compositing, but that was back in the VGA controller days.

Then they evolved to do fixed function rasterization, but those days are over (unless you're Intel doing integrated stuff).

GPUs are MUCH more programmable, and getting more so with each generation. You can do pretty much any floating point math function you want now. Go look up CUDA, and OpenCL they let you basically write C code for the GPU.

Sure the GPUs might not do so well when it comes to brancing, but you'll see that GPU's are being used to do more than just rasterization. Sure razterization would be an important target for NVIDIA/ATI but that doesn't mean it can only draw triangles.

If you look at the paper I linked (which you obviously didn't) it describes how they wrote a ray tracer using NVIDIA CUDA and EXISTING GPUs. If stuff gets more programmable as NVIDIA seems to be targeting, then it will only get easier to write ray tracers which run on the GPU.

If you want proof GPUs do more than rasterization go check out how NVIDIA's GPU tech is now in the Tsubame super computer.

Even Intel is getting into the GPU business with Larrabee, I bet they plan to write a ray tracer for that.

Re:This lawsuit doesn't pass the smell test

[GigaplexNZ]

Intel needs them for high-end graphics

Not according to Larrabee.

Nvidia needs them for the CPU

While that is mostly true, it isn't the whole story. They could solely rely on AMD CPUs (which could either cripple NVIDIA or boost AMD or both), or they could try to weasle around the patent issues and make their own CPU.

"Ouch and double ouch"?

[seeker_1us]

More like strawman and double strawman. Jen-Hsun Huang talks about GPUs. Intel is talking about chipsets.

You can plug an NVIDIA GPU card into an Intel motherboard (I did just that for the computer I am using).

I have no idea why Intel wouldn't want Nvidia to make chipsets for core i7. For some reason, even years after AMD bought ATI, the only Intel mainboards which support two linked graphics cards do so through Crossfire. So if Nvidia doesn't make chipsets to support core i7, Intel would be forcing the hardcore gamers to either (a) buy AMD's video chips to use Crossfire or (b) buy AMD's CPU's to use NVidia SLI.

The other way around too

[DrYak]

While Intel is trying to lock nVidia and ATI/AMD out of the chipset business by bundling the CPU and the chipset and bridging them with an interconnect - QuickPath - which they won't license to nVidia,
nVidia on their hand has tried to do exactly the same, locking Intel and ATI/AMD out of the chipset business by bundling them with the GPU and bridging them with a technology that they won't sub-license either : nVidia's SLI.

nVidia has tried to be the only chipset in town able to do SLI.
Intel is currently trying to be the only chipset in town usable with Core 7i.

Meanwhile, I'm quite happy with ATI/AMD which use an open standard* which doesn't require licensing between the CPU and the chipset (HyperTransport) and another industry standard for multiple GPU requiring no special licensing (plain PCIe).

Thus any component on a Athlon/Phenom + 7x0 chipset + Radeon HD stack could be replaced with any other compatible component (although currently there aren't that many HT-powered CPU to pick from).

*: The plain simple normal HypterTransport is open. AMD has made proprietary extension for cache coherency in multi-socketed servers. But regular CPUs should work with plain HyperTransport too.

Re:The other way around too

[nanoflower]

Who says Intel isn't willing to license it? Certainly not Intel as they have stated that they were working with Nvidia on a new deal. The problem is that Nvidia thinks the new designs are covered by the old agreement and therefore Nvidia doesn't have to pay any more to use the technology of the new Intel CPU. Intel thinks there is enough change in the I7 design that the old license agreement doesn't apply. That doesn't mean that Intel is unwilling to work out a new agreement with Nvidia for licensing the technology in the I7. The fact that they've been talking with Nvidia for so long suggests that Intel is willing to work with Nvidia but they expect to be paid for it, and Nvidia thinks they shouldn't have to pay. As to who is right and who is wrong? I have no idea. It sounds like Intel has a good argument for the new design being different enough to abrogate the license but without reading the actual contract there's no way to know. So it's going to take the courts to figure this out.