Slashdot Mirror
US FTC Sues Intel For Anti-Competitive Practices
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."
... for better or worse, right or wrong. Here's another N-year legal donnybrook for us to enjoy.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
Somehow I doubt the FTC gives a rat's ass about what the EULA says.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
You may not be using intel's compiler, but in the scientific community I knew people who wear by it and those same people spend a lot of money on hardware (adding hundreds of nodes to clusters annually).
Intel's compiler is actually one of the best optimizing compilers out there (when it doesn't detect an AMD processor and not bother doing the optimizations...). It's used in a lot of high-performance computing environments.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Have you considered the possibility that some legal actions are actually about upholding the law, rather than some sinister ulterior motive?
Back when AMD's microprocessors were the state of the art (Athlon), they should have had 50% or more of the chip market. Intel only was able to preserve its market share through illegal means. Eventually, through the billions in extra profit they made, they were able to pull ahead in this technology race. AMD was deprived of billions is profit which they could have used for more R&D to make their chips more competitive today. I don't know how you restore a market where one player has been cheating illegally for a decade and now has a monolopy, but Good Luck FTC.
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.
Generally yes, but the intel compiler really shines by optimizing for the newer instructions that competitors may or may not have yet. SSSE3 (not to be confused with SSE3), SSE4, SSE5, etc are only found on newer intel chips. Not to mention the ones that AMD adds too (3DNow, CVT16, etc) or the differences between comparable instructions and registers (AMD-V/VT-X, AMD64/EM64T, etc). The x86 ISA as a "standard" is quite a mess.
Should we expect intel to track competitors' features for each target platform?
Sigs are for losers
There are some differences(3Dnow! is AMD only, SSE isn't present on some AMD chips, and a whole bunch of other minutia).
Thing is, though, chips declare which features they support: "flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae..." and who made them "vendor_id: GenuineIntel/AuthenticAMD". Intel's compiler, though, was ignoring the feature flags if the vendor_id was not "GenuineIntel". It would be silly to demand that intel support 3Dnow! or any other AMD-specific oddities, or demand that it ensure that the binaries it produces are equally well optimized for the precise architectural details of AMD's CPUs.
Blatantly ignoring the feature flags on non-intel CPUs, though, is another matter.
Wait, a company that produces microprocessors also designed a compiler optimized to run best on that microprocessor? It's a conspiracy!
These changes -- they improved the performance of the compiled applications when run on the microprocessor it was designed for, correct? Even if they intentionally and "maliciously" modified their compiler so that other microprocessor designs performed more poorly, what does it matter? Shouldn't those other microprocessor companies be releasing compilers for their respective designs as well?
It's not anti-competitive for Intel to tell other microprocessor companies to shove off and build their own. They've got no right to the compiler -- however pervasive its use. At worst, the end-user will see products being released with binaries compiled specifically for their processor architecture (just like Linux does now for kernels and many packages). At worst, the companies will need to invest in designing a compiler (as Intel has done). And if it's cost prohibitive, then maybe they'll look to something that's easy to modify and adapt to their needs, like gcc and its related umbrella of tools.
There is no conspiracy: This is business. Business is inherently anti-competitive. If I'm competing with you, I want you out of the game, and just like in a video game, I will use combo attacks and drop-kick you right as you get up (repeatedly) to keep you from recovering until you throw the controller at me. That's just how the game is played. (See slashdot, we can avoid car analogies!)
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There is a difference between not optimising for a competitors processor and deliberately making performance worse for a competitors processor.
Is there? No seriously, is there?
In a sense, everything that I do that gives me competitive advantage impacts my competitors' businesses negatively. Like the earlier commenter said, why is it incumbent upon Intel to write a compiler that works equally well on their competitors' products?
Not disclosing that it doesn't work as well on Intel's competitors' products may be a sneaky trick, but it seems like there should be due diligence on the part of the people using the compiler. Intel does not have a monopoly on compilers. Last I heard, people use Intel compilers because they produce very good code. Cry me a river if Intel would like to produce good code for Intel processors and not others.
Don't get me wrong: I think Intel is being sneaky and underhanded. But I don't see it having done anything illegal, and I don't see how anything it has done should be illegal.
Breakfast served all day!
The FTC press release says:
That sounds like a pretty direct strike against Intel's moves in the graphics market lately. Selling an Atom alone for more than the price of the same Atom bundled with a chipset, trying to prevent Nvidia from making chipsets for their Nehalem CPUs, bundling their own GPU on the package of all of their low to mid range next generation CPUs, etc...
It should be interesting to see how Intel responds to this. It's probably too late to make any major changes to Clarkdale/Arrandale before they ship, so on-package GPUs are definitely coming. But imagine if Intel were required to sell bare dice at fair prices (surprisingly enough, packaging a die is one of the most expensive steps of chipmaking), so that others could do the same thing. Imagine an intel chip with an on-package Nvidia or AMD GPU...
Sometimes I wonder if computers will always be built around motherboards as we know them. As motherboards shrink, and we start seeing multiple dice on a single package even in low end consumer gear, could the motherboard eventually be replaced with one big multi-die package? It would certainly reduce size and bring part counts down, and I expect it would allow for lower power consumption and higher speeds as well (although, of course, it would make building your own as an enthusiast impractical).
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
I hope you're not trying to claim everyone's using either gcc or MS Visual C++.
gcc, while free and flexible (and generally "good enough"), is mildly terrible. The output tends to be substantially larger and slightly slower than that from other compiler products, like the Intel compiler mentioned. And as for Visual... I haven't used it in a long time, so I won't comment, other than to say it's not ubiquitous.
I have had high recommendations from some pretty smart people for the Intel compiler, which is why it's a criminal shame they chose to try to cripple the execution speed of code compiled for their binary-compatible competitor.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Like all US Government actions against large technology companies, this won't change a thing. There will be a dog and pony show for the public, followed by a relatively small bribe...err...fine, and business as usual for Intel.
This won't change a thing.
They don't. But Intel does have a legal obligation to not cripple the product when detecting competing processors. The issue isn't that the compiler didn't know the capabilities of the other chips. It is that they intentionally ignored those capability bits and checked the manufacturer name instead.
While it is true that increased regulations are often a barrier to entry, thereby decreasing competition, that has nothing to do with this case.
The FTC is not adding a new rule, they are enforcing an old one. And that rule can be summarized as: do not deliberately defraud your consumers in one market to make the competition look bad in another market (in this case, market one: compilers, market 2: CPUs).
Any company that cannot stay within that rule will also not be capable of providing a benefit to the market.
Changa hates change.
Thank you. I was not getting the point of this, as the arguments that Intel doesn't have to support AMD's features was simply making more sense. From the initial posts it sounded like Intel simply wasn't supporting features that were untested on AMD chips.
This changes things in a more fundamental way. If I'm understanding you correctly, this isn't a matter of Intel not supporting a feature, but purposely crippling a feature even after detecting that the chip would support it.
//Is there? No seriously, is there?//
Yes, there is quite a difference between not optimizing for your competitor's product and deliberately degrading performance for your competitor's product.
In the former case, there is no additional effort involved; there is a simple decision not to expend resources where they will not provide a return on the investment.
In the latter case, there is a deliberate effort to expend resources with the intention of harming your competitor. And while anti-competitive behaviour may be an unfortunate norm in American business, it is also an illegal behaviour for a company in a monopoly position.
Having hopefully clarified your sloppy manner of thinking (lest others accept it), we can agree your question was deliberately inflammatory and move on.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
AMD is actually in the lead... Intel has no GPU. HAHA
Ya, but at the end of the day, AMD still only has ATI GPUs. Thanks but no thanks. I've been burned far too many times by ATI over the years.
So basically, Intel made an extra effort to ensure that the compiler would work worse with competitor's CPUs. The code to check the supported extensions was already in the compiler and AMD's chips respond in a compliant manner to indicate which ones they support.
If the AMD chip was changed only in that it would respond that it is a GenuineINTEL, code compiled on Intel's compiler would produce a significant improvement in performance. While AMD is far from perfect, their CPUs are price competitive with equivalent Intel chips. If it weren't for AMD, we would still be paying >$1000 for a Pentium 4. That's why I generally avoid buying Intel chips - they're the top dog, yet they don't play fair.
No, I don't trust in god. He'll have to pay up front, like everybody else.
Dear God I hope this is true... my laptop just went in for service because the goddamned nVidia GPU was heating up the CPU (they're both connected to the same heatsink) past 80C. Until they become far more reliable it's back to integrated graphics for me (at least on portables).
That's a good point. I've never used the Intel compiler myself, and really, I would expect Intel to do something jerky like this any time I used a vendor-specific tool.
However, at GDC 2008, Intel had a big display where they were going on about their compilers and how well they optimized things. Apparently they have tools that can analyze the code and generate multithreaded code (sounded like OpenMP, kinda) and SIMD instructions (SSE, SSE2, etc.). They unambiguously claimed that those optimizations applied to both Intel and AMD processors. They went out of their way to assure people that they weren't doing this. So it is really funny to find out that they are. I hope they do the presentation again next year and so I can ask their engineers some very pointed questions about this. It sounds like they were flat-out lying.