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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."
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).
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.
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
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.
The end result of your philosophy is a society where one or two mafia-like power structures control everything, and everyone else is essentially slaves. Whether those power structures are national governments or corporations the dynamic is much the same. Granted that appears to be what a lot of people want. Preservation of a free society requires limitations on the abuse of power. The FTC part of that mechanism.
I write software that may be run on either Intel and AMD processors, so I need a compiler that works for both. If Intel wants to be in both the compiler business and the microprocessor business, they can't intentionally design their compiler to sabotage AMDs microprocessor business. If there are no limits on that sort of thing, then inevitably one company gets a near monopoly, uses its position to screw over everyone, and everything stagnates and we get poorer. This dynamic is why many impoverished parts of the world are impoverished. To the extent that we embrace that model, our economies will wind up in the toilet also.
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.
//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.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.