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]

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: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.

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.