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US FTC Sues Intel For Anti-Competitive Practices

Posted by timothy on from the in-the-interim-please-use-the-ftc-compiler dept.

Vigile writes "And here Intel was about to get out of 2009 with only a modestly embarrassing year. While Intel and AMD settled their own antitrust and patent lawsuits in November, the FTC didn't think that was good enough and has decided to sue Intel for anti-competitive practices. While the suits in Europe and in the US civil courts have hurt Intel's pocketbook and its reputation, the FTC lawsuit could very likely be the most damaging towards the company's ability to practice business as they see fit. The official hearing is set for September of 2010 but we will likely hear news filtering out about the evidence and charges well before that. One interesting charge that has already arisen: that Intel systematically changed its widely-used compiler to stunt the performance of competing processors."

9 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I especially like.. by InsaneProcessor · · Score: 5, Informative

    The compiler identified the CPU and changed it's behavior to be unoptimized if not the "golden" part. This falsely caused publicly used benchmarks to show competitors parts to be slower.

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    Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
  2. Re:I especially like.. by plasmacutter · · Score: 4, Informative

    I like the complaint about the compiler. After all, Intel should be required to optimize their compiler for their competitor. To each according to his need...

    The allegation is their compiler can, but deliberately does NOT, apply optimization to code if it detects the processor is AMD.

    This is analogous to video game consoles refusing to use generic memory sticks or hard drives. Of course, intel will try to claim it's more like trying to attach a sata drive to an IDE port, but we all know the instruction sets for X86 are standard across both chips.

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    VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
  3. Re:Intel compiler not that good on their own parts by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Informative

    because of the hardware differences, and didn't put in a switch for AMD, well, who says they had to,

    Apparently, the government. You see it wasn't a case where they simply didn't setup their compiler to optimize for AMD's parts. They explicitly made it run worse if you were running non-Intel hardware. Normally that would just be incredibly sleezy, but Intel is quite possibly in a monopoly position, which makes some behavior that's normally just sleezy illegal instead.

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    "People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
  4. Intel's response by parallel_prankster · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/12/16/intel-responds-to-ftc-suit/

  5. Re:Well, duh. by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, the company designed a compiler that performed a lot of optimizations for the particular instruction set they implemented, and then hard coded the compiler to not actually apply those optimizations on their competitors' implementations. The optimizations would have worked, and Intel had the compiler deliberately not apply them.

    There is no conspiracy; Intel just broke the law. If you are competing with me, you have to follow the law, no matter how much you want me out of the game.

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    Palm trees and 8
  6. Re:I especially like.. by InsaneProcessor · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's break it down. For instructions sets like SSSE3, SSE4, etc. Intel designed bits to identify if these instructions are supported. All competitors comply with these bits. What they did do is: if the part isn't identified as "Genuine INTEL" the compiler stopped code optimizations. This is a provable fact.

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    Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
  7. Re:Well, duh. by Virak · · Score: 4, Informative

    So Intel should be required to test out their competitors products for compatibility with these optimizations, as well as its own products?

    Are you fucking kidding me? Intel didn't just "not test" it with AMD's stuff, they went out of their way to make sure it wouldn't work on it. And if AMD's processors didn't run x86 code properly a whole lot more people would notice then just the ones using Intel's compilers. Do you even have any clue how a compiler works?

    I'm not defending Intel here

    You are saying that what Intel did with their compiler is perfectly legitimate. I don't see how you can spin that as anything but defending them.

    the issue is whether Intel is allowed control over its own products

    And that issue is long-settled: they are not allowed control over their own products to they extent they can harm competition in the market as they please. The only possible "issue" is whether their actions did or did not illegally harm competition.

    If you ask me, the solution is to unbundle the CPU from the rest of the system architecture. I know, it's difficult to imagine even amongst IT people because the CPU has long been the center of the system -- everything is designed around that. Well, maybe it's time for that to change. And the FTC should put its focus there -- just as we unbundled Internet Explorer from Windows -- the software, it's time to unbundle the hardware.

    Okay, now I'm definitely sure you don't understand the slightest bit about the technology involved. The CPU is already "unbundled" from everything to the maximum extent technically possible. They cannot "unbundle" it any further. The code would've run just fine on AMD's chips precisely because it is "unbundled" and is an interchangeable piece of hardware with multiple independent implementations. Intel has absolutely no defense here, certainly not on technical grounds, and you're just making yourself look like a fool trying to argue for them.

  8. Re:Well, duh. by Virak · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.

    Unless it is part of a massive pattern of grossly anti-competitive behavior which they then get repeatedly sued all over the world for. Then, not so much.

    But if the product is then changed so the third party's products no longer work, that's always bad? It's always anticompetitive?

    If they intentionally and maliciously change it for no purpose but to prevent their competitor's product working with it, yes.

    What you're suggesting here is that not "harming the competition" is more important than a company's right to design its products to be as beneficial to use together as possible.

    "Suggesting"? I guess I was too subtle. I'll state it very explicitly: The proper functioning of the market is far more important than the ability of a company to do with its products as it pleases. And this doesn't make their products more "beneficial to use together", it just makes it less beneficial to use it with the product of a competitor to them in a different market, as has been repeatedly pointed out to you by both me and others. And after talking about how we should "unbundle" things like with Windows and IE, it doesn't make much sense to be saying companies should be allowed to do that sort of stuff freely.

    And no, they're very bundled -- I can't use an AMD processor with an Intel chipset. Motherboards are designed around the CPUs -- and while the peripherals (memory, expansion cards, etc.) may have standardized interfaces, the guts of the system does not.

    If there were published standards about how CPUs connect to the mainboard, and if the mainboard's major components were made interoperable (open BIOS, SMC, all that jazz--) that would be unbundling. The bottom line here is that if these parts were interchangable -- so that you didn't have to decide on the CPU first and then the rest of the system, that would be "unbundled". That would be a more fair marketplace than what exists right now.

    "But then Intel can't make their products work as best possible with each other! What right do you have to tell them what to do with their own products!" And so on. Your arguments are once again not being internally consistent, even within the same post. While it'd certainly be nice if hardware manufacturers were completely open about all their stuff, this sort of thing in particular (making every processor work on every motherboard) is quite a bit of effort for very little benefit, particularly in this case. Being able to run an AMD processor on a motherboard for an Intel processor whilst giggling to yourself about how funny it is is about all you get out of it. It wouldn't prevent any of the highly anti-competitive things Intel has been doing, not even just the specific case of them being jerks with their compiler.

  9. Re:I especially like.. by cheesybagel · · Score: 4, Informative

    No it was much worse than that. There is a CPU instruction named CPUID which tells you the processor family, manufacturer, and has a set of feature flags saying which extensions (e.g. SSE, SSE 2, 3DNow) that particular processor supports. Intel's compiler enabled SSE optimizations only if the processor manufacturer string was "GenuineIntel" and the processor family number was high enough, instead of checking in the flags vector if the processor supported SSE.